Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Technoscientific innovations continue to transform the markers of kinship as new social groups participate in their consumption. From 1970s "turkey baster babies" created by lesbians "doing-it-themselves" to gay men "cruising to familyland" (Stacey 2003) through surrogacy, technoscience figures centrally in the construction of new kinship forms. In 2003 the Raellian religious cult reported that the second cloned child was born to a lesbian couple. Real or imagined, apocalypse and possibility are complexly woven into these technoscientific cultural narratives. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines processes of "techno-semen" donor selection for assisted reproduction among lesbians. I found that lesbians actively construct kinship as affinity-ties, relatedness made possible by shared biological, cultural, and/or social attributes. As kinship is constructed, futures are imagined that hold possibilities for solidifying heteronormativity and for queering reproduction and kinship.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: During the 1790s, in the wake of the adoption of the Constitution, the U.S. was in the process of working out the legal status of Native peoples. In response to the U.S.’s presumptuous and violent assertion of authority in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, a broad alliance had formed to resist that invasion, with its locus in the area just west of the Ohio river, and the U.S. was forced to engage with that confederacy in light of the dismal failure of armed campaigns in 1790 and 1791. As part of that effort, the U.S. employed Hendrick Aupaumut, a Mahican chief, as an envoy to convey the country’s honorable intentions and desire for reconciliation to the peoples of the Ohio region. Aupaumut’s “A Short Narration of My Journey to the Western Country,” a report of his 1792 mission, works to shift the terms of U.S. policy. Using a familial idiom to discuss political relations among peoples, the text insinuates that the U.S. will need to recognize and adapt to Native geopolitics, the longstanding traditions of diplomacy and negotiation shared among peoples stretching from western Massachusetts to beyond the Mississippi. Rather than insisting that Indian nations should be treated like European ones, Aupaumut’s narrative situates the U.S. within Indigenous political norms and networks, less presenting a “middle ground” than indicating the coherence and persistence of Native political frameworks organized around kinship. Although serving as an agent of the U.S. government, Aupaumut does not so much work to enable the incorporation of other Native peoples into a U.S. regulated system as assert the impossibility of a unilateral peace orchestrated on Euramerican terms.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper argues that Thucydides’ teaching about glory reveals a fundamental kinship between love of glory and piety, and therefore between politics and religion, for both express the same eros or passion for transcending the self.

Publication Type: Panelist Abstract
Abstract: This paper will explore the kinship between Rap and traditional Negro Spirituals as social activist musical genres. Exploring their historical evolutions, conducting lyrical and musical structural analyses, and examining each genre’s musical ambassadors, will illustrate why these genres were able to transcend national borders to propel global revolutionary movements. While extending past cultural and national barriers, both genres experienced the ramifications of transcendence in music, causing their messages to shift and become diluted in some instances. After experiencing these modifications, this paper will discuss whether these musical forms are still formidable tools in forging global social change.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper explores one aspect of the controversy over naming a legally recognized same-sex relationship “civil union” or “domestic partnership” instead of “marriage:” there is an information cost to having a multiplicity of similar family forms. Different names impose additional “identity work” on same-sex couples and those with whom they interact. The paper argues from the theory, developed by Henry Smith and Thomas Merrill, that limiting the number of forms of property – the “numerus clauses” principle – is justified by information cost. Many strangers must interact with what Merrill and Smith call “in rem” property. They must easily recognize the property as property, and then behave appropriately. Similarly, one among the many functions of the status of marriage is to structure various anonymous or casual social interactions between members of the couple qua couple and strangers. Strangers must recognize the relationship and act appropriately, legally or socially. Calling same-sex relationships by a different name than “marriage” disrupts these casual interactions, imposing uncertainties and costs on all the participants. Evidence supporting the information cost argument is found in the same-sex marriage cases and in the forthcoming report of the New Jersey Civil Union Commission. Information cost arguments can also help explain why the claim to the name ”marriage” is similar for same-sex couples and interracial couples, and is distinguishable from claims to polygamous “marriage” and from claims to legal recognition as “marriage” of a multiplicity of family arrangements, as sought by feminist and queer left critics of the marriage equality movement.