Donna McCormack

The biopolitics of precarity and the self

This Special Issue explores the biopolitics of precarity and the self. In so doing, its aim is to critically examine the changing landscape of technologies of the self and techniques of domination in late capitalism. It brings Foucault’s work on biopolitics into conversation with recent feminist, Marxist, postcolonial, disability and queer scholarship on precarity. In a feminist tradition of thinking through relationality and ethics, this Special Issue engages with those moments when technologies of regulation, surveillance and normalization do not quite work. ‘The Biopolitics of Precarity and the Self’ analyzes recent debates on precarity and precariousness in relation to migration and labour, health and illness, and the formation of the self and collectivities. It identifies temporality and care of both the self and others as key dimensions of precarity and explores how biopolitical structures of neoliberal capitalism institutionalize precarity that exacerbates existing global and local inequalities. We therefore raise questions around what it means to live, endure, survive and make life and labour possible without doing harm to the self or others. In this sense, this Special Issue brings to the fore the temporalities, politics and ethics of what is not always recognized in biomedical practices, labour migrations, media representations, labour of the self and everyday agency.

Transplant temporalities and deadly reproductive futurity in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams

This article explores the generally pathologized relationship between organ recipients and the families of deceased donors. Its focus is Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2003 production 21 Grams because this film brings to the fore both the urgent desire of the organ recipient to be close to the donor family and the purported pathological ramifications of such encounters. Furthermore, the formal representation of time portrays the very ways in which normative structures of temporality are disrupted and perhaps irreversibly altered by the organ transfer process. The article explores how the film forecloses the possibility of the organ recipient and the donor family creating a viable relationship. It argues that the film terminates a transplant temporality by structuring the narrative ending through a normative linear trajectory of reproductive heterosexuality. It concludes with an examination of how the donor family returns to a life of sameness where social norms are restored and repeated, and where transplantees accept a deadly fate so that anxieties about bodily relationality and disruptive temporalities can be assuaged.

Queer Disability, Postcolonial Feminism and the Monsters of Evolution

This article offers an original analysis of contemporary representations of evolutionary theory. It does so by turning to the lesser-known work of evolutionary biologist Richard Goldschmidt, who placed the “hopeful monster” at the heart of evolution. Diverging from the critiques of evolutionary theory as a colonial, able-ist, racist and misogynist discourse, this article proposes Goldschmidt’s The Material Basis of Evolution as the potential to reconfigure feminist, postcolonial, crip and queer approaches to narratives of origins. Focusing on the ever-rising presence of macromutation in contemporary literary and visual texts, this article offers an important contribution to feminist, postcolonial, crip and queer thinking on inter-and intra-relationality between species and environments, on difference, and on the temporality of species development. It situates its analysis of Hiromi Goto’s Hopeful Monsters in contemporary Canadian politics of colonisation, multiculturalism and the increased medicalisation of racialised and disabled bodies. In so doing, if offers a considerable contribution to the analysis of the necropolitical landscape of postcolonial belonging, addressing how little known theories of evolution may challenge such structural inequalities and violence.

Living with others inside the self: decolonising transplantation, selfhood and the body politic in Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring

This article examines anxieties concerning organ transplantation in Nalo Hopkinsons prize-winning novel Brown Girl in the Ring (1998). The main focus is how this novel re-imagines subjectivity and selfhood as an embodied metaphor for the reconfiguring of broader sociopolitical relations. In other words, this article analyses the relationship between the transplanted body and the body politic, arguing that a post-transplant identity, where there is little separation between donor and recipient, is the foundation for a politics based on responsibility for others. Such a responsibility poses a challenge to the race and class segregation that is integral to the post-apocalyptic world of Hopkinsons novel. Transplantation is not a utopian vision of an egalitarian society coming together in one body; rather, this biotechnological intervention offers a potentially different mode of thinking what it means to work across race, class and embodied division, while always recalling the violence that might facilitate so-called medical progress.

Gender and colonial transitioning: Frantz Fanon's Algerian freedom fighters in Moroccan and Caribbean novels?

This article analyses the ways in which Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary narrative in L’An V de la révolution algérienne is reworked in selected novels of Tahar Ben Jelloun and Shani Mootoo. Focusing on Fanon’s transitional politics, it draws out how these novelists employ gender transitioning to challenge colonial, nationalistic and familial violence. The article suggests that the intersections of anti-colonial rhetoric and familial discourse present in Fanon’s work are reconfigured in these novels through a questioning of assumed gendered, sexual and national taxonomies of belonging. It proposes a notion of community that seeks to avoid the reiteration of colonial and familial violence through a transitional politics and an ethics of becoming.

Intersections of Lesbian Studies and Postcolonial Studies: One Possible Future for Class

Abstract This position piece addresses the decline of class as a mode of inquiry in Lesbian Studies and Postcolonial Studies. It argues that in spite of this decline, class continues to forcibly pervade all areas of our lives and, therefore, should be fundamental to the research praxis of these fields of study. It goes on to suggest that the intersections of these two disciplines are able to open up a space where questions regarding class and its global dimension in the twenty-first century can be addressed. It concludes by reflecting on the possibility of an ethical methodological approach to research.