Jacqueline Stevens

Racial Meanings and Scientific Methods: Changing Policies for NIH-sponsored Publications Reporting Human Variation

Conventional wisdom holds that race is socially constructed and not based on genetic differences. Cutting-edge genetic research threatens this view and hence also endangers the pursuit of racial equality and useful public health research. The most recent incarnation of racial genetics is not due to scientific discoveries about population differences per se, but follows from how the United States and other governments have organized racial categories. This article explains tensions in U.S. government guidelines and publications on the study of human genetic diversity, points out the absence of any compelling public health benefits that might justify this research, introduces conceptual tools for addressing the complicated heuristic and policy problems posed by medical population genetics, and offers two policy proposals to remedy the current problems.

Beyond Tocqueville, Please!

Rogers Smith in “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America” in the September 1993 issue of this Review argues that ascriptive inequalities (eg. racism, sexism, nativism) are neither mere deviations from liberalism nor only symptoms of liberalism. Rather, multiple ideologies coexist in uneasy tension. Jacqueline Stevens criticizes Smith for failing to attend to the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and others—whose descriptions of American ideological history, she says, provide the same insight that Smith claims as his own. She goes on to discuss how defining a “mainstream” of scholarship shapes inferences as to what counts as knowledge and further suggests that liberalism and exclusion betray an underlying consistency. In his reply, Smith recognizes the contributions of Du Bois and others, but argues that although they do foreshadow his work, they do not offer the same critique or do the same job. And he asserts that the linkages between liberalism and ascriptive inequality are political, economic, social and psychological—not logical—ones.

ON THE MORALS OF GENEALOGY

The article describes how an intellectual community of those following French trends in the academy have, for the past forty years, been offering a mistaken reading of Friedrich Nietzsches concept of genealogy. The essay shows how Nietzsche mocks moral psychologists by calling them genealogists, contrasts Nietzsches work with that of genealogists, and then documents how subsequent academics, encouraged by the work of Gilles Deleuze and, in turn, Michel Foucault, created a revaluation of genealogys meaning, thereby fetishizing their own scholarly authority.

Symbolic Matter: DNA and Other Linguistic Stuff

This is an article about some underlying assumptions for rather old debates between those who think scientists report on facts about the universe and those who belive that inevitably the investigators reveal something of themselves in their disciveries. I have three points I want to press. One is a very simple but I hope disarming response to the luminaries of the scientific method who, jumping up and down, indicate that gravity exists so therefore postfoundationists should not. A second is a more substantive exploration of symbolic matter, or language of stuff: the importance of seeing that ideas do not simply cause material effects but are always themselves material. And third, I urge those who think that by excluding questions of heuristics from their investigations they are being scientific to reread their Popper, whose Logic of Scientific Discovery currently recognised in a variety of social sciences. The focus in this essay is debates about DNA and racial taxonomies, but this is just one rather convenient example of how research documents about the citizenry change the object of analysis - us. While social scientists have published reams of work verifying, say, that effects of information on electoral decisions, the truly important implications of this rather obvious knowledge have been shunted aside. If we know do not have just the intuition but the SPSX certainty that when the press publishes accounts about political candidates or issues this affects political behaviour, than why doubt that when scientific documents publicize various features about different groups, attitudes, aspirations, we too will change our minds, change who we are?

Recreating the state

Abstract If analysts want to understand the forces that give rise to the sovereign units that make up the ‘us’ and ‘them’ comprising the affinities and enmities of enduring inter-state inequality and systemically violent conflict, then we must move beyond the Weberian understanding of the state as an institution that has a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence and towards a deeper understanding of the rules that hold together the state as a membership organisation. This means several things but, for the purposes of this article, imagining the cessation of war and a truly global politics (committed to enabling conditions for the creative recreation of the planet and its inhabitants, regardless of where or to whom they were born) means understanding how all states create the form of the ‘other’ liable to yield death as an active or passive consequence of their kinship rules.

Pregnancy Envy and the Politics of Compensatory Masculinities

Dominant psychoanalytic paradigms locate the breast or penis/phallus as the touchstone for gender/sex/sexual development. This essay offers a critique of these accounts and an alternative theory of sexed forms of being: pregnancy envy and the kinship rules that result from this. The essay also provides an intellectual history of how previous efforts to theorize pregnancy envy, especially work by Ida Macalpine, were suppressed. This article has benefited from audiences at the Yale University Feminist Lesbian and Gay Workshop, the City University Lesbian and Gay Studies Workshop, and the University of Southern California Center on Feminist Research, as well as from comments by Marianne Constable, Lisa Ellis, Laura Green, James Martel, Hanna Pitkin, and Michael Rogin. Many thanks especially to the reviewers and editors for their extremely helpful suggestions, including the reference to Bruno Bettelheim ( 1962 ).

The Political Theory of Michael Rogin

Michael Rogin was a brilliant and truly original scholar. His work didn’t fit into any of the established categories; it was controversial, sometimes even idiosyncratic. But when Michael took up a topic, he left the terms of scholarly debate on that topic fundamentally altered. Basically, he was a historian and a radical cultural critic, and of course, an Americanist. He analyzed literature, art, film, along with documents and letters—manifestations of both high and low culture—using the categories of Freudian psychoanalysis to expose, in detail and with precision, the violence, racism, and exclusion hidden beneath America’s self-image as a liberal, egalitarian, constitutional republic. Yet his writing was not self-righteous or even polemical, and his claims were always supported by empirical and textual evidence. But because he was an Americanist and I am not, it would be unseemly for me to assess his scholarship further. Nor would it be relevant to this symposium, which concerns the scholarship of his students. Michael and I were good friends for close to forty years, but that doesn’t belong in this symposium

Reshaping justice: International law and the third world: an introduction

This special issue of Third World Quarterly is devoted to exploring critically the past, present and future relevance of international law to the priorities of the countries, peoples and regions of the South. Within the limits of space it has tried to be comprehensive in scope and representative in perspective and participation. The contributions are grouped into three clusters to give some sense of coherence to the overall theme: articles by Baxi, Anghie, Falk, Stevens and Rajagopal on general issues bearing on the interplay between international law and world order; articles highlighting regional experience by An-Na’im, Okafor, Obregon and Shalakany; and articles on substantive perspectives by Mgbeoji, Nesiah, Said, Elver and King-Irani. We think this collective effort gives an illuminating account of the unifying themes, while at the same time exhibiting the wide diversity of concerns and approaches. It is evident that, from times past, international law has provided the powerful with a series of instruments by which to exploit and control the weak, and even provided legal cover for colonial rule. With this historical awareness, it is evident that there is no necessary linkage between international law and global justice; indeed, it is more convincing to claim that the historic experience, with some exceptions, most clearly expresses the reinforcing interconnections between law, power and injustice. But international law, as with all law, is a two-edged reality and, with political and moral imagination, can be used advantageously by the weak to resist the plunder and invasions of the strong. Domination by the powerful has always produced resistance, and international law has been crucially shaped by it. The struggle against colonialism and economic imperialism was waged not only on battlefields and through diplomacy, but also in arenas where new norms of legitimacy were established. The United Nations, despite its frequent subservience to geopolitical manipulations, did lend an aura of legitimacy to the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid movements, and helped confirm the legality of Third World claims to sovereignty over natural resources and foreign investments. International law has also been a very useful tool in the hands of a global civil society and social movements in making concrete progress towards equity, democratisation and accountability. And, by so doing, it did manage selectively to reconnect international law with some important issues of global justice. At the same time, as with the backlash against efforts by the South to legislate ‘a new international economic order’, it has not been possible to A R T IC L E S Third World Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 5, pp 711 – 712, 2006

Forensic Intelligence and the Deportation Research Clinic: Toward a New Paradigm

Since 2012, the Deportation Research Clinic, part of the Buffett Institute for Global Studies at Northwestern University, has been pursuing research on government misconduct under the rubric of what Jacqueline Stevens calls “forensic intelligence.” The Clinic uses law and publicity, including scholarship, to create new realities, which in turn produce new facts and knowledge. Stevens draws on scholarship by S.M. Amadae, Noam Chomsky, Philip Green, Chalmers Johnson, Kenneth Osgood, Ido Oren, Michael Rogin, and Frances Saunders to explain the relation of “forensic intelligence” to the “national intelligence” paradigm now organizing mainstream political science research. The article concludes by describing how U.S. government and economic elites distort research and teaching priorities, and provides examples from Northwestern University.

A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body, by Ed Cohen. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009

does diminish the excellence of golf in certain respects, while also saying that this is a case in which equality justifiably trumps excellence? The tension between equality and excellence is “enduring and irreducible” precisely because our efforts to level the playing field really have undermined certain notions of excellence. LaVaque-Manty resists offering general principles (though he joins many others in endorsing Sen’s capabilities approach). He means to avoid “fix[ing] concepts” that have been in flux at least since the eighteenth century. We are left wondering what meritocracy means beyond the world of sports, in the case, for example, of affirmative action and equal opportunity in education or employment, one of the most controversial areas where the equality– excellence dilemma plays out. Of course, this is LaVaque-Manty’s point. He means to leave room for actual politics. The justifiability of the use of different social categories (sex, class, race, disability) in sports and beyond will depend “on social conventions and on political agreement among participants, not on any obviously undeniable facts” (p. 149). So, LaVaque-Manty concludes, voluntary practices such as sports do fall within the purview of justice, and people do have a right to meaningful competition. But what that right entails depends on social practices and meanings, which are interpreted and contested through politics.