Haverford College

Join us for a talk in the Perspectives Series by Kyla Schuller!

This will be a hybrid talk, join the Zoom here.

White feminism names a self-serving politics of gender liberation that leans in to racism, capitalism, colonialism and more in order to benefit the few. This talk proposes that white feminism also functions as a biopolitics. Schuller revisits leading feminist figures of the twentieth century—Margaret Sanger, Betty Friedan, and Janice Raymond—to illuminate the biological investments running throughout their work. They conceptualize Woman as an organic category and a population unto themselves in need of defending, cleansing, and optimizing. The lens of biopolitics clarifies some long-simmering debates within feminism, including the extent to which Margaret Sanger’s approach to birth control was eugenic, and the place of trans women’s rights in 1970s lesbian feminism and the gender-critical movements of today. 

Bio: Kyla Schuller is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Faculty Director of the Women’s Global Health Leadership Certificate Program at Rutgers University--New Brunswick. She is the author of The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism (Bold Type Books, 2021) and The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Duke UP, 2018).  

Schuller is the co-editor of the special issues “Origins of Biopolitics in the Americas” (American Quarterly, 2019), winner of the CELJ Best Special Issue 2020 Award, and “The Biopolitics of Plasticity” (Social Text, 2020). Her research has appeared in GLQ, American Quarterly, Configurations, Discourse and other journals and has been supported by the Stanford Humanities Center, American Council of Learned Societies, and UC Humanities Research Institute. Her public writing includes essays in The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Post Road. She received her Ph.D. in Literature from UC San Diego in 2009 and lives in Philadelphia.     

Perspective Series, 2022-2023

The Libraries Perspectives Series offers two to three lectures per year on a topic selected by the Faculty Advisory Committee. The 2022-2023 series will focus on the theme of biopower and biopolitics.  Masks, vaccines, le pass sanitaire, der e-Impfpass, confinement, and surveillance are some of the contested responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Yet, the struggles between states and citizens over public health are not unique to our era.  We are interested in scholars who explore the ways in which the biological has been and is mobilized by state and non-state actors in the name of population, territory, security, health, and disease.  What forms do these interventions take and what are their effects?  How are such efforts resisted and rejected by citizens?  How have biopolitics and state actions of the past informed contemporary questions we continue to confront?  This speaker series will coincide with  student-curated exhibitions on the theme of BioPower in  Lutnick Library next fall and one on Lenape cultural representation in the spring.  The former exhibition comes out of a course taught by Lisa Jane Graham and Darin Hayton, and it draws on materials in Haverford's Special Collections. The spring exhibition focuses on cultural artifacts of the  Lenape Nation and will be augmented by our Quaker Collections.

Please click the link below to join the webinar: 

https://haverford.zoom.us/j/99619077935?pwd=Tk1lMjBxMmhQVVNmL21MVWZqc3A2Zz09

Passcode: 025877

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Passcode: 025877

    International numbers available: https://haverford.zoom.us/u/a9rFfZ1LN