RESEARCH
BOOK PROJECT
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BOOK PROJECT *
modernizing the mind: gender, race, and cognitive citizenship
(In Progress)
All psychologists who have studied the intelligence of women, as well as poets and novelists, recognize today that they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man. They excel in fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason. Without doubt there exist some distinguished women, very superior to the average man, but they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads; consequently, we may neglect them entirely. - Gustave Le Bon
Brains are really everything. - Anita Loos
The turn of the twentieth century is a transformational time for conceptualizations of citizenship and belonging. In this moment, a wide variety of specialists – from anthropologists and physicians to psychologists and biologists – work to define intellectual hierarchies between men and women and between “civilized” and “savage” people. They write, like Le Bon does above, about all the ways women, queer people, disabled people, and people of color fail to measure up intellectually to their straight, white, able-bodied male counterparts. The result is that intelligence becomes a key category for the adjudication of legal, political, and social rights. As Anita Loos explains, in the early twentieth century, “[b]rains are really everything.”
My monograph, Modernizing the Mind: Gender, Race, and Cognitive Citizenship, argues that literature is an important archive for understanding this pivotal time. Literature indexes the emergence of cognitive citizenship: a system of legal changes and shifting social norms that define belonging through the policing of exclusionary hierarchies of cognitive capacity. In literary texts, we can see how disability, gender, race, and sexuality are constructed in the discussions of the modern mind that are used to define cultural and legal belonging. Analyzing fictional representations makes visible the need to question the story structures central to the biopolitical modernization of the mind, even as it also offers an opportunity to see the cognitive forms through which authors assert survival within those structuring logics.
Portions of this project have been published as articles in Studies in the Novel (“Feeling Angry”) and Modern Fiction Studies (“Race, Gender, and ‘Real Brains’”). You can see a brief description of those essays below.
Journal articles
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book chapters
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Journal articles ✳︎ book chapters ✳︎
This essay argues that Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive (2019) experiments with literary techniques often associated with the “big, ambitious novel” to represent the pervasive problems created by US racial construction. More specifically, it contends that Luiselli's novel evokes the archive in its fragmentation, recombinant organization, and narrative multiplicity as a means for demonstrating the complexity and relentlessness of the refugee crisis and the constructions of Latinx difference that develop alongside it.
Revision as method
“Revision as Method,” Latinx Methods and the Politics of Praxis, edited by Maia Gil’Adí and Thomas Conners, Duke University Press (forthcoming).
This book chapter is a part of the forthcoming collection Latinx Methods and the Politics of Praxis. In it, I argue that we need to understand revision not just as way to clarify or refine, but as a heuristic technique—a means for producing new knowledge through acts of intentional, iterative thinking. Focusing on revision as a method emphasizes the epistemic value of the gaps, layers, contradictions, and variegations that develop in acts of rewriting. In Latinx studies, acts of revision can be understood as experimentations that highlight how race is constructed in historically specific contexts even as it responds to (and participates in) the endless adaptability of narratives of racial difference. Latinx revisions do not offer us a better or new kind of Latinidad, they tell us something about how ways of understanding race are produced, reified, and (maybe) resisted.
Jean Rhys is a white Caribbean author whose representations of “stalled” or “failed” women characters are often understood to highlight the challenges of personal growth in colonial space and time. In this article, I contextualize this language of stalled maturity through an attention to eugenics discourse, arguing that an analysis of Rhys’s slow storytelling demonstrates the nuanced ways colonial narratives of cognitive development were mobilized in the early twentieth century.
This article analyzes narrative reliability in Nella Larsen’s Passing by putting it in the context of eugenics discourse and circulating ideas of gendered modernity. Larsen’s use of focalization – the formal separation of narrating voice and focalizing consciousness – illuminates how race and gender bias can be naturalized in ascriptions of reliability. I argue that narrative unreliability is inextricable from cultural and social contexts and that reading Passing with this in mind highlights the frame structures (both narrative and sociopolitical) that function to challenge Black women’s articulations of independence and intelligence in the early twentieth century.
In this essay, I analyze a newly recovered short story of Eaton’s called “Draught of Bewilderment: A Tale of Modern China.” Noting how this story fits into her broader oeuvre, the article considers Eaton's repeated return to representations of gendered modernity as an exploration of the varied ways ableism, classism, and racism play out in the construction of seemingly neutral ideas of progress and modernity. This essay was published alongside the first reprint of the story since its first publication in a needlework magazine in 1908. You can see the full story as well as an introduction to the story by June Howard, here. To read my article, click the link on the left.
Because of the way biographical films are interpolated into historical memory, the genre serves as a particularly rich space for thinking about the stakes of and strategies for diverse and equitable representation. In this chapter, I analyze how biographical films position their subjects as a part of a genealogy of “Latina” feminism and I consider what we learn about different conceptualizations of Latinidad and feminism when we look at how biographical films are promoted, produced, and received. In the end, I suggest that concentrating on the representation of Latinas in biographical cinema provides insight into the complex and always political process of representing historically marginalized people in nuanced and productive ways.