Jennifer Terry
Since January 2003, I have been an associate professor of Women’s Studies with affiliations in Anthropology and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Irvine. My scholarship is concentrated in Feminist Cultural Studies; Science, Medicine, and Technology studies; comparative and historical formations of gender, race, and sexuality; critical approaches to modernity; state-sponsored violence; and American studies in transnational perspective. I was a visiting professor at Columbia University in Spring 2014. I have previously taught at UC Berkeley and Ohio State University. I received my PhD in History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz.
My books include An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (University of Chicago Press, 1999), Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture (Indiana University Press, 1995), and Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life (Routledge, 1997). I have written articles and chapters on reproductive politics, the history of sexual science in the United States, contemporary scientific approaches to the sex lives of animals, love of objects, signature injuries of war, and the relationship between war-making practices and entertainment.
I am now completing a book tentatively titled Attachments to War: Violence and the Production of Biomedical Knowledge in Modern America. Modern modes of militarization and innovations in medicine are deeply entangled with one another and bound up in a relationship of mutual provocation. How did this come to be so? What are the effects of this entanglement? How does this entanglement tie war making to humanitarianism? These questions are central to what I am writing as a way of exploring how ordinary people become deeply attached to war today in ways that are either rarely acknowledged and routinely disavowed or hyperbolically celebrated as painful yet redemptive truths. My focus, in the book, is on how state-sanctioned wounding provokes the expansion of medical knowledge to produce new techniques and technologies aimed at contending with and sometimes exploiting the damage done by war. This relationship of mutual provocation, I argue, perpetuates and elaborates processes of militarization by redeeming war as a necessary condition for human advancement. I examine a series of cases, each center around a particular kind of wound, to analyze how the entangled relationship between war making and medical knowledge takes particular form in the context of the United States’ imperial expansion, tracing back to the turn of the twentieth century.
In 2008, I completed a three-year National Science Foundation collaborative project on Privacy, Identity, and Technology, with Paul Dourish and Simon Cole. I chaired the department of Women's Studies at UC Irvine from 2005 through 2008 and from 2010 through 2012. I was a member of the Critical Theory Institute at UC Irvine from 2005 through 2008 and founder and coordinator of the Queer Studies Minor degree program at UCI.
Address: Irvine and San Francisco, California, United States
My books include An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (University of Chicago Press, 1999), Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture (Indiana University Press, 1995), and Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life (Routledge, 1997). I have written articles and chapters on reproductive politics, the history of sexual science in the United States, contemporary scientific approaches to the sex lives of animals, love of objects, signature injuries of war, and the relationship between war-making practices and entertainment.
I am now completing a book tentatively titled Attachments to War: Violence and the Production of Biomedical Knowledge in Modern America. Modern modes of militarization and innovations in medicine are deeply entangled with one another and bound up in a relationship of mutual provocation. How did this come to be so? What are the effects of this entanglement? How does this entanglement tie war making to humanitarianism? These questions are central to what I am writing as a way of exploring how ordinary people become deeply attached to war today in ways that are either rarely acknowledged and routinely disavowed or hyperbolically celebrated as painful yet redemptive truths. My focus, in the book, is on how state-sanctioned wounding provokes the expansion of medical knowledge to produce new techniques and technologies aimed at contending with and sometimes exploiting the damage done by war. This relationship of mutual provocation, I argue, perpetuates and elaborates processes of militarization by redeeming war as a necessary condition for human advancement. I examine a series of cases, each center around a particular kind of wound, to analyze how the entangled relationship between war making and medical knowledge takes particular form in the context of the United States’ imperial expansion, tracing back to the turn of the twentieth century.
In 2008, I completed a three-year National Science Foundation collaborative project on Privacy, Identity, and Technology, with Paul Dourish and Simon Cole. I chaired the department of Women's Studies at UC Irvine from 2005 through 2008 and from 2010 through 2012. I was a member of the Critical Theory Institute at UC Irvine from 2005 through 2008 and founder and coordinator of the Queer Studies Minor degree program at UCI.
Address: Irvine and San Francisco, California, United States
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Keywords: objectùm-sexuality, feminist technoscience, intimacy, heteronormative nationalism, security, synecdocal marriage
Events
This gathering is intended as an informal discussion for those of us working on humanitarianism, activism, and social interventions at UC Irvine. The workshop will give us an opportunity to receive supportive and generative feedback on our own work and discuss a range of intersecting themes from diverse disciplinary and methodological perspectives. These could include, but are not limited to: emerging and transforming practices of humanitarianism; intersections between practices of social intervention and security; militarization of care; new articulations of security, danger, and risk; moral and affective dimensions of intervention; and the wider politics of claim-making that surround emergencies, crises, and danger.
Keywords: objectùm-sexuality, feminist technoscience, intimacy, heteronormative nationalism, security, synecdocal marriage
This gathering is intended as an informal discussion for those of us working on humanitarianism, activism, and social interventions at UC Irvine. The workshop will give us an opportunity to receive supportive and generative feedback on our own work and discuss a range of intersecting themes from diverse disciplinary and methodological perspectives. These could include, but are not limited to: emerging and transforming practices of humanitarianism; intersections between practices of social intervention and security; militarization of care; new articulations of security, danger, and risk; moral and affective dimensions of intervention; and the wider politics of claim-making that surround emergencies, crises, and danger.