Geography Commons^™

Tracing Biometric Assemblages In India’S Surveillance State: Reproducing Colonial Logics, Reifying Caste Purity, And Quelling Dissent Through Aadhaar, Priya Prabhakar

Scripps Senior Theses

Tracing Biometric Assemblages in India’s Surveillance State seeks to understand the historical conditions that rendered the nation-state of India as having the world’s largest biometric surveillance system: Aadhaar. Surveillance practices used by the British Raj mirrors the current social order of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as they use surveillance to similar ends in today’s political economy, through the intersecting forces of neoliberalism and ethnonationalism. This thesis is an exploration into how India’s current surveillance regimes cultivate biometric surveillant assemblages through Aadhaar. Contrary to claims that Aadhaar was created to empower the poor, I argue that these surveillance regimes …

A Genealogy Of Neoliberal And Anti-Neoliberal Resilience In The Ecuadorian Pacific Coast, Vanessa Leon Leon

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Resilience appears to be everywhere, morphing and seducing global discourses, national governmental practices, and scholarship. Inasmuch as hegemonic discourses and national governments promote resilience through both disaster reduction and sustainable development policies, critical resilience scholars have emphasized resilience as a neoliberal security technique. By reinforcing resilience as a governmental practice embedded in neoliberal rationale, theory and practice are neglecting other areas to contextualize resilience. My dissertation traces a genealogy of neoliberal and anti-neoliberal State interventions underpinned by resilience thinking, organizing coastal rural lives in Ecuador. My dissertation shows, no matter the Ecuadorian governments’ rationale, both genuflected to global hegemonic discourses …

Ecological Crisis, Or “Intersex Panic,” As Answer Of The Real?, Stephanie Hsu

The Goose

Drawing upon Cal’s eventual metamorphosis into “The [white] Man” in Middlesex, and an examination of the Real of ecological crisis, Hsu explores the intersection of environmental racism, climate change denial, and intersex discrimination in order to advocate for a renewed awareness of ecological interdependency and the need for self-determination of people of colour in ecological and environmental justice discourses.

Trans-Pacific Imaginaries And Queer Intimacies In The Ruins Of Middlesex, Dai Kojima

The Goose

Taking up Roland Barthes’s concept of the “third meaning,” Kojima analyzes the character of Julie Kikuchi, the Japanese American love interest of the grown-up Cal. Taking Julie seriously as a character beyond mere plot contrivance and cultural reference, Kojima invites us to consider the intertwined histories of economic rise and fall, trans-Pacific wars, and other intimacies that Middlesex remains entangled in yet fails to fully acknowledge.

Materialism’S Affective Appeal, Elizabeth Mazzolini

The Goose

Citing the pronounced lack of academic engagement with Middlesex since its publication and riffing on the novel’s recounting of the demise of the auto industry in Detroit, Mazzolini examines how cycles of obsolescence and currency work within academic discourse and ultimately advocates for the novel’s potential for examining the material and affective nature of relevance itself.

On Being Intimate With Ruin: Reading Decay In Middlesex, Kaitlin Blanchard

The Goose

Blanchard argues for an intimate attention to the ruin in Middlesex and Detroit as a means of exploring the geo-bio-politics of decay as a problem of our socio-ecological present.

From Rusty Genetics To Octopussy’S Garden, Stacy Alaimo

The Goose

Alaimo critiques the “rusty” understanding of genetics, gender, and sex in Middlesex, advocating instead for queer ecological futurism.

Mulberiddlesex, Catriona Sandilands

The Goose

Through a careful tracing of the botanical presence of mulberry trees in Middlesex, Sandilands argues for a reading practice that takes plants seriously. Thinking with plants interrupts the tendency to consider literary plants primarily as motifs, metaphors or agents of crude naturalization. Sandilands insists on involving plants in reading Middlesex in order to take the novel in less anthropocentric directions: even as Cal enlists mulberries to signal inevitability, their own stories overflow the novel’s deterministic views of race, species, territory, and gender identity.

Border Crossings, Watery Spaces, And The (Un)Verified Self In Middlesex, Jenny Kerber

The Goose

Kerber traces the ways in which water liberates and transforms various characters in Middlesex in order to critique and complicate water’s taken-for-granted liberatory powers. Kerber invites us to consider the majority of those for whom water is as deadly as it is (possibly) emancipating, especially those most vulnerable to climate change and other ecological and violent upheavals.

Dehumanism And Disposability, Julietta Singh

The Goose

Singh draws our attention to the “mute objects” of Middlesex, particularly The Obscure Object’s silent Black maid, Beulah, who quietly supports the unfolding romance between Cal and The Object. Through careful attention to histories of people silenced by slavery, dehumanization, and violence, Singh demands that we consider where and through what means some get to be fully human while others are made and sustained as objects for their comfort and play.

Beyond The Biography Of A Gene, Laura J. Collins

The Goose

Collins approaches the ethical nuances of Cal’s intersex narrative in Middlesex, drawing comparisons with current debates in North Carolina concerning gender-normative bathroom use and trans rights, in order to advocate for more ethical practices of relation and responsibility outside of mere knowledge creation and policy.

Middlesex And The Biopolitics Of Modernist Architecture, Nicole Seymour

The Goose

Highlighting the architecture of the Middlesex house of Eugenides’ novel as a major technology of modernity, Seymour argues for the biopolitical understanding of such modernist architecture and for the ways in which it often works against the exploitative effects of automation and sexology, yet constitutes a complex and even contradictory force in processes of modernization, and in the novel itself.

Introduction: Sex And The (Motor) City: Ecologies Of Middlesex, Kaitlin Blanchard, Catriona Sandilands

The Goose

This special cluster consists of twelve short essays, originally presented in two linked roundtables at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) conference in Detroit in June 2017, examining Jeffrey Eugenides' 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex. Through the novel, these papers explore the historical, intersectional, and ecological understandings of Detroit, exposing an exceptional—indeed, epic—range of social ecologies, concerned with everything from intersex and multispecies bio/geopolitics to transnational economies, to the aesthetics of architecture and decay. Focused on a very particular novel, written about a very particular city and experience of it, these papers bring to light and …

Embodied Ecologies And Metafictional Musings: The Limits Of Writing Intersex In Middlesex, Christopher Breu

The Goose

Breu critiques the limits of the intersex narrative of Middlesex and advocates for a non-reductive, materialist, and “muddled” approach to understanding sex and gender.

Manifestly Haraway By Donna J. Haraway, Andrew Gordon Jeffrey

The Goose

Review of Donna J. Haraway's Manifestly Haraway.

Captive: Zoometric Operations In Gaza, Irus Braverman

Journal Articles

“We are the only people in this world who are living under such total occupation. Israel sees us as being equal to our animals, and sometimes they even value us less than our animals.” This quote, from the founder of the Gaza Zoo, demonstrates both the significance and the complexities of human-animal relations in Gaza, especially at times of siege and war. My article draws on ethnographic encounters and investigative analysis to relay how Gaza’s spatial confinement generally, and the Israeli incursion into Gaza of summer 2014 in particular, has lent itself to a radicalized discursive interplay between the animalization …

Informal Urban Displacement In Rio De Janeiro: Ecolimits And Disaster Biopolitics In The Favela Santa Marta, Charles L. Heck

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the effect of environmental discourse and disaster risk reduction mapping in the favela Santa Marta, an urban informal settlement in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. With the world’s largest urban forest within the metro area, Rio de Janeiro is unusual for a metropolis of more than ten million people in the rapidly urbanizing country of Brazil. The government of Rio de Janeiro has attempted to control favela settlements since the early 20^th century, but beginning in the 1990s the prefecture began delimiting favela settlements with environmentally protected areas called ecolimits. According to the state’s …

The Regulatory Life Of Threatened Species Lists, Irus Braverman

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 1 in Animals, Biopolitics, Law: Lively Legalities, Irus Braverman, ed.

“The Regulatory Life of Threatened Species Lists” explores a prominent technology for the legal regulation of nonhuman life: the threatened species list. I argue that threatened species lists are biopolitical technologies: they produce and reinforce underlying species ontologies by creating, calculating, and governing the boundaries between various nonhuman species. Such a differentiated treatment of the life and death of nonhuman species through their en-listing, down- and up-listing, multi-listing, and un-listing translates into the positive protection and active governance of such species. Listing threatened species thus becomes a …

Food Fight: Sharing Meals And Confronting Biopolitics In The Disciplinary City, Jeremy Sorenson

Theses and Dissertations

This project interrogates the tensions surrounding food provision in Las Vegas, Nevada. More precisely, groups of ad hoc individuals, unaffiliated with local shelters or social service provision agencies intervene in homelessness and hunger in the city by showing up in places where homeless individuals congregate and provide food, water, basic medical sundries and companionship to those on the streets. Conversely, local officials and shelter administrators conceptualize these activities as damaging to homeless individuals and have acted to prohibit these acts of care. Engaging with key contributions in the geographic literature, I employ specific frameworks - critical poverty research, disciplinary bio- …

On Borders And Biopolitics: An Interview With Eithne Luibhéid, Samantha Herr, Tim Vatovec

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

No abstract provided.

Streets Not Named: Discursive Dead Ends And The Politics Of Orientation In Intercommunal Spatial Relations In Northern Greece, Olga Demetriou

Olga Demetriou

In light of recent discussions on the anthropology of space and theories of governmentality, this article analyzes the entrenchment and interaction in space of ethnic and national identities in an environment in which competing conceptualizations of space persist. The town of Komotini, in northern Greece, is inhabited by both Greek and Turkish speakers; both communities have claims to a variety of ethnic and geographical origins. These claims are presented in different contexts, such as national celebrations, street naming, and instances of communal and intercommunal interaction. The article analyzes how the claims of different actors are related through the examination of …