Monday, January 30 / 4PM
STERN LOUNGE Austin Room 217
“Reproductive Nationalism in the U.S. and India”
Guest Lecture by Asha Nadkarni
Based on her most recently published book, Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India (University of Minnesota Press), this presentation by the Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst explores the idea that whenever feminists lay claim to citizenship based on women’s biological ability to “reproduce the nation,” they are participating in a eugenic project – sanctioning reproduction by some and prohibiting it by others.
Professor Nadkarni shows how the exclusionary impulse of eugenics – that is, improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics – is embedded within the terms of nationalist feminism.
Asha Nadkarni received her B.A. in gender and women’s studies from Connecticut College, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Brown University. Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial literature and theory, transnational feminist theory, American empire studies, and Asian American studies, with an emphasis on the literatures and cultures of the South Asian Diaspora. She is working on a second book project, tentatively titled “From Opium to Outsourcing,” that focuses on representations of South Asian labor in a global context.
Free and open to the public, this event is sponsored by Asian/Asian American Studies Institute and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
For more information, contact: Ms. Fe Delos-Santos at fe.delos-santos@uconn.edu