Heidi J. Nast | DePaul University (original) (raw)

Books by Heidi J. Nast

Palgrave MacMillan, 2024

Spatial Futures invites readers to imagine power and freedom through the lens of the ‘Black Outdo... more Spatial Futures invites readers to imagine power and freedom through the lens of the ‘Black Outdoors’, a transdisciplinary spatial concept that operates beyond the planetary, stratigraphic confines of the ‘Anthropocene’. The chapters collectively point to the ontological-epistemological contradictions involved in forging liberatory spatial futures. Bringing new spatial imaginaries to bear in and outside geography, the book refuses the strictures of the ‘cenic’, entertaining difference as world-making.

The monumental palace of Kano, Nigeria, was built circa 1500 and, by the early 00's, was inhabite... more The monumental palace of Kano, Nigeria, was built circa 1500 and, by the early 00's, was inhabited by more than one thousand persons. Historically, its secluded interior housed hundreds of concubines whose role in the politics, economics, and culture of Kano city-state has been largely overlooked. In this pioneering work, Heidi J. Nast demonstrates how human-geographical methods can tell us much about a site like the palace, a place bereft of archaeological work or relevant primary sources. Drawing on extensive ethnographic work and mapping data, Concubines and Power presents new evidence that palace concubines controlled the production of indigo-dyed cloth centuries before men did. Palace concubines were to the assessment and collection of the state's earliest (grain) taxes, forming a complex and powerful administrative hierarchy that used the taxes for palace community needs. Social forces undoubtedly shaped and changed concubinage for hundreds of years, but Nast shows how the reach of concubines extended beyond the palace walls to the formation of the state itself.

... xi The cover illustrations: a word from the artist by Cindy Davies xii 1 Introduction: Making... more ... xi The cover illustrations: a word from the artist by Cindy Davies xii 1 Introduction: MakingPlacesBodies HEIDI J. NAST AND STEVE PILE 1 ... in Kano, Nigeria 69 HEIDI J. NAST PART 2 ConfiningPlacesBodies 87 7 Harem: colonial fiction and architectural fantasm in turn-of-the ...

Animal-human relations; 'race' and pets by Heidi J. Nast

Routledge, 2021

This entry examines the geopolitical economic utility of the dog in China during the Chairmanship... more This entry examines the geopolitical economic utility of the dog in China during the Chairmanship of Mao Tsetung (1949-76) and how this pivoted unexpectedly with the neoliberal initiatives that Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping (1978-1992) enacted. In so doing, it troubles the Marxian analytical divide between exchange (pet) and use value (meat). By drawing on the dyadic co-evolutionary connection between canine and human, the distinction between exchange and use is seen to be grounded in an uninterrogated relational (reproductive) economy of death, wherein the constitution and meaning of life is rendered arbitrary and fungible.

Animalia: A bestiary of our times, 2020

With the rise of the British Empire, selective breeding assumed much greater political and econom... more With the rise of the British Empire, selective breeding assumed much greater political and economic importance. Its cultural productivity circulated through and gathered force from two imaginaries of the international: the industrial standard and biological race, their synergy making plain the inseparability of empire and industry. Standardization valued the uniformity of mechanically produced industrial goods and a purity reminiscent of race; while race found in the standard new logical and practical means of hierarchically parsing, ordering, and organizing bodies and space. The machine’s sheer material power and metering abilities carried the racial cruelties through which industrial and imperial-colonial life was recognized and made, including that of the canine.

https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-1-4780-1128-6_601.pdf

There has been no political economic study of pitted dog fighting to date. For the most part, tho... more There has been no political economic study of pitted dog fighting to date. For the most part, those writing about the blood sport address its history idiographically, drawing on interviews, fieldwork, 19th- and 20th-century dog-fighting anecdotes (primarily from the UK and US), and/or 19th- and 20th-century photographs, engravings, and paintings of dogs or dogs with their owners. This emphasis on describing as a form of truth-telling has permitted little in the way of theorizing why pitted dog fighting happened where and when it did/does, or why it has appealed to the demography it has and does. Instead, such description has lent itself to other kinds of truth-telling relayed in moralizing terms. Crudely put: pitted dog fighting involves a much bloodshed, which tells us that those involved are cruel, criminal, and very bad; by contrast, those engaged in pitted dog rescue and rehabilitation are kind, heroic, and good. Nineteenth-century language about the inherently immoral and cruel nature of dog fighting was first formulated by bourgeois reformers and continues to be recycled, except that amongst even the earliest writers there were those who recognized and took umbrage over the class-striated hypocrisy concerning how vice and crime were defined and punished. That said, a number of scholars have related contemporary pitted dog fighting to masculinity (a sport monopolized by men), their work beginning to trace out some of the sport’s historical material contours.
This chapter picks up on these and similar impulses to explore the earliest political economy and geography of pitted dog fighting, based in Britain. Drawing heavily on primary and secondary sources, I explore how the Industrial Revolution, and early British colliery life specifically, produced material equivalencies between pitted dog fighting and pitted men, both of whom were made to operate “under circumstances of excruciating trial.” The bull and terrier dogs that became the lifeblood of pitted dog breeding were colliers’ most intimate companions, these dogs’ documented abilities to fight unprovoked modeling how colliers would come to see themselves as fighters uniquely able to survive conditions not of their own making.

Critical animal geographies (Collard and Gillespie, eds), 2015

Cultural Geographies, 2005

Supremacy_Sex_Queerdom_Psychoanalysis_Dolls... by Heidi J. Nast

Area, 2020

Abstract This paper takes a preliminary look at a commoditised form of caregiving that emerged i... more Abstract
This paper takes a preliminary look at a commoditised form of caregiving that emerged in the first decade of the new millennium in the USA, China and Japan: adult male breastfeeding (AMBF). I argue that AMBF is emblematic of both the changing geography of industrial production since the 1973 oil crisis and how consumption has since come to be the most important economic task of those within privileged nations and enclaves. AMBF emphasises how marketing forces today have deployed what are increasingly maternalistic imaginaries to emphasise the degree to which a product or service dyadically recognises, affirms and cares for its consuming subjects. The marketised maternal is rooted in the racialised reproductive savings of those long given privileged access to the superior productivity of the Machine, which compelled smaller family size. It is these savings that have allowed for new dyadic intimacies to be fashioned between the maternalised “market‐and‐me.” The flipside of this is that privileged consumers are increasingly infantilised, even as its dependencies are supported by a workforce largely procreated by racially diminished other‐mothers (ROMs). Infantilism, in turn, psychically shields consumers from the planetary devastations that have made privileged consumption possible. AMBF holds theoretical promise by making the unconscious nature of desire‐for the maternal (as a dyadic site of caregiving) explicit along with the latter's revolutionary potential.

AREA, 2018

Available at: https://rdcu.be/5AKn This paper takes a preliminary look at a commoditized form of... more Available at: https://rdcu.be/5AKn
This paper takes a preliminary look at a commoditized form of caregiving that emerged in the first decade of the new millennium in the US, China, and Japan: adult male breastfeeding (AMBF). I argue that AMBF is emblematic of both the changing geography of industrial production since the 1973 oil crisis and how consumption has since come to be the most important economic task of those within privileged nations and enclaves. AMBF emphasizes how marketing forces today have deployed what are increasingly maternalistic imaginaries to emphasize the degree to which a product or service dyadically recognizes, affirms, and cares for its consuming subjects. The marketized maternal is rooted in the racialized reproductive savings of those long given privileged access to the superior productivity of the Machine, which compelled smaller family size. It is these savings that have allowed for new dyadic intimacies to be fashioned between the maternalized ‘market-and-me.’ The flipside of this is that privileged consumers are increasingly infantilized, even as its dependencies are supported by a workforce largely procreated by racially diminished other-mothers. Infantilism, in turn, psychically shields consumers from the planetary devastations that have made privileged consumption possible. AMBF holds theoretical promise by making the unconscious nature of desires for the maternal (as a site of caregiving) explicit and because, in so doing, it begs questions of race and sexual difference and why, where, and when the marketized maternal has become so important.

Dialogues in Human Geography, 2018

This commentary brings geopolitical economic sensibilities about sexual difference, possession, a... more This commentary brings geopolitical economic sensibilities about sexual difference, possession, and the Machine into conversation with Lewis' cyborgic uterine to make three analytical points. First, transcalar uterine thinking has long existed, seasoned by geopolitical economic circumstance. Uterine thinking in nonmechanized agrarian contexts has circulated primarily through imaginaries of maternal fertility, the material expanse of which exceeds the limits of biological mother and child. The Machine gained authority over the agrarian by feeding off, and replacing, the maternal, of which the uterine is only part. By addressing geopolitical economic difference, Lewis's analysis would be enriched by an abundance of gestational thinking that operates beyond the Machinic cyborg. My second and related analytical point has to do with how Lewis locates the uterine as a gestational prize that anyone should be able to have; as long as the uterus remains rooted in sexual dimorphism, the male-born body is potentially unfree. Thus, even as she speaks of how gestation need not be contained by a real uterus, she considers its absence in the biological male body a source of potential deprivation that, for freedom's sake, would best be undone. This undoing would limit the geographical possibilities for queering the maternal. My third point emerges out of the second and has to do with how unconscious desire has historically geographically depended on sexual dimorphism, not the uterus. I'm not sure, but it seems that the interiorized cast of Lewis' cyborgic uterine makes it difficult to theorize relational attachments-her 'holding and letting go'.

Society + Space (online), 2017

This paper identifies two geographically uneven economic developments that have worked to sidelin... more This paper identifies two geographically uneven economic developments that have worked to sideline the biological (child-bearing) and social maternal: the industrial machine (the Machine) and commodity markets. In facilitating mass production, the Machine has worked to render human labor (and, by reproductive implication, the biological maternal) redundant, while mass commodity markets have increasingly assumed dyadic (maternal) care-giving functions. Growing maternal obsolescence is globally evident, today, not only in declining total fertility rates (TFRs) and smaller family sizes, but in the considerable reproductive savings that have accrued to those privileged enough to be freed from the biological family. Most of these savings have been directed into marketized non-reproductive recreational domains that treat the body to an array of pleasures. The contradiction, here, is that both evolution and social life depend on the dyadic care afforded by the maternal. Without it, the human species becomes extinct, along with the binary sexual difference on which it has depended (see Grosz, 2011).

But there is another contradiction that is geographical in nature and has to do with the fact that the Machine was initially made the privileged preserve of supremacist industrial nation-states, as were the majority of mass commodity markets that Machinic waged labor made possible. In keeping the Machine and markets away from the enslaved and colonized, Machine-deprived (agrarian) populations were compelled to rely on the maternal body for the labor needed to survive, this characteristically leading to higher TFRs in colonial and postcolonial areas. Maternal redundancy has hence taken on racialized spatial proportions (Nast, 2015).

After the 1973 oil crisis, financial interests sought factor savings by relocating the Machine to thousands of export processing zones world-wide, taking advantage of those formerly colonized regions with higher TFRs (or, in the case of China, a large population created through earlier pro-natalist policies). Much of the labor needed in these zones was pooled there through structural mechanisms of dispossession, especially the leasing or purchase of traditional, communal, and common lands through foreign direct investment (FDI). Foreign direct investors thus came to feed off the reproductive labor of racialized other-mothers, producing enclaves of racialized hyperexploitation that I refer to as “neo-industry.” Dispossessed other-mothers and their children sought additional means of survival by migrating within and across borders to take up reproductive tasks inside privileged domains, again at highly race-discounted rates. The biologically intact other-mother in this way became productively and reproductively essential to precisely those regions and demographies most invested in the maternal’s Machine- and market-led replacement.

This essay explores the sexed and supremacist geographical-biological implications of maternal alienation and how its unevenness can be used productively to queer notions of kinship. I begin by drawing on an unlikely theorist, Friedrich Engels, who in 1883 speculated on how the maternal body has historically operated to ontologize value, partly owing to its extraordinary power to curate the human. Maternal ontologies of value obtained for millennia until the sexed-competitive making of patriliny and private property. I combine his insights with those of Jacques Lacan who pointed out that the human infant requires far more dyadic care than other species to become independent, this dyadism having dramatic psychical effects. Much of this care has historically derived from the maternal body, its biological armature suited evolutionarily to infant and child survival. Even so, care has also always been social, with potentially anyone able to care-give. It is in this opening between the biological and social that the queer maternal emerges as a force of radical kinship and care. The final section looks at how, in order for this radicality to unfold, the fetishized proportions of the nation-state and self-contained household need to be un-done. To the degree that the dyadic maternal is necessary to life and the living, it opposes the death-producing, sexed-competitive tendencies of private property which has colonized both body and world.

Society + Space, 2017

This essay explores the sexed and supremacist geographical- biological implications of maternal a... more This essay explores the sexed and supremacist geographical- biological implications of maternal alienation and how its unevenness can be used productively to queer notions of kinship. I begin by drawing on an unlikely theorist, Friedrich Engels, who in 1883 speculated on how the maternal body has historically operated to ontologize value, partly owing to its extraordinary power to curate the human. Maternal ontologies of value obtained for millennia until the sexed-competitive making of patriliny and private property. I combine his insights with those of Jacques Lacan who pointed out that the human infant requires far more dyadic care than other species to become independent, this dyadism having dramatic psychical e!ects. Much of this care has historically derived from the maternal body, its biological armature suited evolutionarily to infant and child survival. Even so, care has also always been social, with potentially anyone able to care-give. It is in this opening between the biological and social that the queer maternal emerges as a force of radical kinship and care. The final section looks at how, in order for this radicality to unfold, the fetishized proportions of the nation-state and self-contained household need to be un-done. To the degree that the dyadic maternal is necessary to life and the living, it opposes the death-producing, sexed-competitive tendencies of private property which has colonized both body and world.

Social & Cultural Geography, 2016

Japan’s 1990s financial crisis proved psychically traumatic for many men, their trauma exacerbate... more Japan’s 1990s financial crisis proved psychically traumatic for many men, their trauma exacerbated by decades of falling fertility rates and related sociospatial attenuation. The crisis disrupted a range of heteronormative practices that had stabilized post-war gendered identities, especially marriage and stay-at-home motherhood. Some men consequently began seeking comfort in the company of youthful-looking, large-format, hyper-feminized commodity-dolls of which there are two psychical kinds: ‘infantile’ dolls used largely by precariously positioned young men for comfort and play; and expensive ‘Oedipal’ silicone sex dolls associated with Japanese salarymen whose jobs had become less secure. Both have worked emotionally for two reasons: dolls are evocative of the maternal – the basis of intersubjective (be) longing/Eros; and the dolls are owned, ownership allowing pleasure and control more securely to intertwine. Following the oil crisis and the de-industrialization that followed, men in racially and economically privileged terrain across the US and Europe turned to similar kinds of commodity dolls for comfort, if for differently sexed and racialized reasons. Japanese men’s doll markets therefore speak to certain particular and general conditions of masculinity and geopolitical economic trauma.

Résumé
La crise financière du Japon dans les années 90 s’est avérée traumatique psychiquement pour de nombreux hommes, leur traumatisme étant exacerbé par des décennies de baisse du taux de fertilité et l’atténuation socio spatiale qui y est associée. La crise a bousculé un ensemble de pratiques hétéronormatives qui avaient stabilisé les identités des genres, surtout le mariage et la maternité au foyer. C’est ainsi que les hommes ont commencé à chercher le réconfort en compagnie de poupées de consommation grand-format, d’apparence jeune et hyper féminines, dont il existe deux catégories psychiques : les poupées « infantiles » utilisées principalement par des jeunes hommes en situation précaire pour le réconfort et le jeu et les poupées sexuelles «oedipiennes », chères et en silicone associées aux Japonais salariés. Les deux ont fonctionné émotionnellement pour deux raisons : les poupées sont évocatrices du maternel – fondement de l’Eros / désir (ou appartenance) intersubjectif et les poupées sont possédées, la possession permettant de mêler le plaisir et le contrôle plus solidement. Après la crise du pétrole et la désindustrialisation qui ont suivi, les hommes de conditions raciales et économiques privilégiées à travers les Etats-Unis et l’Europe se sont tournés vers des poupées sexuelles d’un genre similaire pour y trouver le réconfort, même si c’était pour des raisons sexuées et raciales différentes. Les marchés de poupées pour les Japonais parlent donc à certaines conditions particulières et générales de masculinité et à un traumatisme géopolitique économique.

Resumen
La crisis financiera de 1990 en Japón demostró ser psíquicamente traumática para muchos hombres, cuyo trauma ha sido exacerbado durante décadas por la caída de la tasa de fecundidad y la atenuación socio-espacial relacionada. La crisis interrumpió una serie de prácticas hetero-normativas que había estabilizado las identidades de género de la posguerra, especialmente el matrimonio y la maternidad en el hogar. Como consecuencia, algunos hombres comenzaron a buscar consuelo en la compañía de muñecas con aspecto juvenil, de gran formato e híper-feminizadas, de las cuales hay dos tipos psíquicos: muñecas ‘infantiles’, que son utilizadas en gran medida por hombres jóvenes precariamente posicionados para jugar y encontrar consuelo; y costosas muñecas sexuales de silicona ‘edípicas’, asociadas con los hombres japoneses asalariados. Ambas han funcionado emocionalmente por dos razones: las muñecas evocan el sentido maternal — la base del (pertenecer) anhelo/eros intersubjetivo; y las muñecas les pertenecen a estos hombres, lo cual permite entrelazar el placer y el control de una forma más segura. Luego de la crisis del petróleo y la des-industrialización subsiguiente, los hombres en lugares racial y económicamente privilegiados en los EE.UU. y Europa recurrieron a tipos de muñecas similares en busca de consuelo, acaso por diferentes razones sexuales y raciales. Por lo tanto, los mercados japoneses masculinos de muñecas denotan ciertas condiciones particulares y generales de la masculinidad y del trauma económico geopolítico.

Keywords: Japan, sex dolls, political economy, psychoanalysis,
Mots clés: Japon, poupées sexuelles, économie politique, psychoanalyse,
Palabras clave: Japón, muñecas sexuales, economía política, psicoanálisis,

Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 2015

The exclusive geographical placement of industrial machinery—what I henceforth refer to as “the m... more The exclusive geographical placement of industrial machinery—what I henceforth refer to as “the machine”—was singularly important in securing and stabilizing the White working class
male subject as an exceptionally productive one. Such spatial anchoring allowed the machine’s profoundly superior technological abilities to be singularly claimed by, associated with, mapped onto, and incorporated into the body of industrial man and nation. In so doing, both were categorically rendered phallic (exceptional) agents of progress and history.
The geopolitical and psychical security afforded by supremacist national and bodily mappings was significantly challenged in the 1970s when deindustrialization and restructuring began to gain strong international hold. The slow removal of one of the main historical props of White male subjectivity and nationhood—the machine—led some to armor themselves psychically against (racialized) others, accusing the latter of stealing their industrial jobs, or of stealing (migrating) illegally into the nation. I argue that such defensiveness must be seen not simply in terms of simple economic stresses related rationally to unemployment, but in psychical terms as anxieties unconsciously related to bodily and, as we will see, parental loss.

This paper draws on political economic and psychoanalytic theories of the maternal to explore why... more This paper draws on political economic and psychoanalytic theories of the maternal to explore why comparatively advantaged heterosexual men across the US and China began investing in life-sized, heteronormatively configured, and highly realistic silicone female sex dolls in the 1990s and new millennium, respectively, in keeping with similar investments in Canada, Russia, France, Germany and, Japan. The growing popularity speaks not only to the realism afforded by technological advances in material sciences, but to geopolitical economic traumas related to: the 1973 oil crisis, de-industrialization, and the evisceration of male-centric unions in the US and Europe; the simultaneous and widespread entry of women and persons of color into a more precarious workforce both within and outside deindustrializing contexts; and the contemporaneous and meteoric neoindustrialization of the Chinese economy, which saw the rise of extreme wealth disparity, social inequality, and gender ratio imbalances. The traumas were not unrelated to those attending the 1990s Soviet " transition " to capitalism and Japan's 1990s financial crisis. By the first decade of the new millennium, certain men across these arenas were finding comfort in the arms of large breasted, youthful looking, white or Asian silicone sex dolls for reasons I argue cannot be understood outside the political economic and psychical force of the maternal and sexual difference.

Palgrave MacMillan, 2024

Routledge, 2021

Animalia: A bestiary of our times, 2020

https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-1-4780-1128-6_601.pdf

Critical animal geographies (Collard and Gillespie, eds), 2015

Cultural Geographies, 2005

Area, 2020

AREA, 2018

Dialogues in Human Geography, 2018

Society + Space (online), 2017

Society + Space, 2017

Social & Cultural Geography, 2016

Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 2015

Psychoanalytic Geographies, 2014

Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, 2011

The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the ... more The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the
labor-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus
increases with the potential energyof wealth. But the greater this reserve army in
proportion to the active labor-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated
surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has
to undergo in the form of labor. The more extensive, finally, the pauperized
sections of the working class and the industrial reservearmy, the greater is official
pauperism. This is the absolute generallaw of capitalist accumulation (Marx 1990
[1976]:798, emphasis in original).

This collection of papers re-examines Marx’s notion of surplus populations in light of contemporary capitalism and a world marked by tremendous global shifts in fertility rates, almost unprecedented rates of outmigration to hegemonic nation-states and enclaves, heightened levels of investment in (and hyper-exploitation of) formerly colonizednations, and massive degradation of the environment. Taken together,these processes trace the current configuration of Anibal Quijano’s“coloniality of power”, a concept that, as Marion Werner (this issue)tells us, “indexes the ways that capitalist accumulation is constituted through the reworking of hierarchies of racialized and gendered difference, thus redrawing the social and spatial boundaries betweenhyper-exploited wage work and the people and places cast out from its relations” (Quijano 2000; Werner this issue). What is most remarkable about all of these processes is how thoroughly racialized they are, and how thoroughly intertwined racial formations have become with regimes of reproduction. Arguably, “race” has never been deployed so variably nor constructed so contingently and quixotically in the subordination of truth to power and life to death as it has since the beginning of the long downturn of the 1970s and its heightening into global recession and industrial restructuring in the 1980s (McIntyrethis issue; Nast and Elder 2009; Winant 1994, 2001). One cannot, therefore, understand surplus populations without understanding how the geographical dynamics of accumulation have become increasingly racialized. Nor can one understand the shifting forms of racialization without taking into account the hierarchical regimes of reproduction that constitute them (cf Gilmore 2002).

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2000

This paper argues that modern constructions of “race” are inherent in specifically modern constru... more This paper argues that modern constructions of “race” are inherent in specifically modern constructions of heterosexuality and that both of them inform the normative familial quadrad: Mother, Father, Son, and the Repressed (Bestial). These mythic familial categories constitute the basis of the “oedipal” family and are instrumentally interconnected. Here the oedipal triad of Mother-Son-Father is ideationally encoded as white, the repressed bestial being “colored”– typically “black.” I argue racism’s immanence to oedipal familial constructions by spatially reworking Fredric Jameson’s notion of the political unconscious. In so doing, I develop ways for thinking through how the psyche can be understood as a structured and libidinized spatial effect, a repository of colonial violences of body and place, unspoken and hence repressed (“unconscious”). I propose the term racist-oedipalization (after Deleuze and Guattari's oedipalization) to connote the processual ways in which racist thinking and practices are integral to white oedipal family structures and norms. In so doing, I explore how racist-oedipal configurations have worked variably, in the interests of contemporary and past colonialisms, to great embodied geographical effect. The paper begins by theoretically linking blackness to incestuousness and colonization to productions of the psychical “unconscious.” The core of the paper threads the theory through particular racialized geographies in the U.S. These include, on the one hand, southern plantation slave and post-Reconstruction settings, and, on the other hand, urban segregationary practices impelled by the University of Chicago, culminating in their racialized plans for urban renewal in the 1950s.

Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, 2022

This paper explores the potential for certain gay white men to benefit from postindustrial sector... more This paper explores the potential for certain gay white men to benefit from postindustrial sectors that depend structurally and implicitly upon white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. The paper maps out how gay white patriarchies coexist with, and in some cases displace, hetero-normative patriarchies, shoring up pre-existing racialized and politically and economically conservative processes of profit-accumulation. Former cultural investments in a fatherhood defined by biological procreation are accordingly dislodged by investments in fatherhoods abstracted from procreation, which circulate in a variety of commodity forms. Motherhood is geographically and socially sidelined, procreation becoming a service and commodity form purchasable from impoverished places within or outside nations. The white oedipal Family romance is geopolitically reconstituted, with the proprietary reach of patriarchy irrupting out of the confines of the biologically homebound and racist triad of mother-father-son and into extra-familial, and often transnationalized, domains of racialized and class-transected procreational purchase. Sister, sister where did we go wrong? Tell me what the fuck we're doing here Why are all the boys acting strange? We've got to show them we're worse than queer

Queer Racisms, Queer Patriarchies, International, Special Issue This collection has been several ... more Queer Racisms, Queer Patriarchies, International, Special Issue
This collection has been several years in the making and arose in large part as a result of my participation in the Lesbigay Caucus and (as co-chair, with Glen Elder) the Sexuality and Space Specialty Group (SSSG) of the Association of American Geographers (AAG). In these venues and as a discussant or participant in several SSSG-sponsored sessions in annual AAG meetings, I experienced palpable, gendered tensions amongst queer folk. My supportive co-chair and I tried to negotiate some of these tensions by devising bylaws for the SSSG that would help structurally to ensure gendered diversity in the leadership.
In particular, we suggested that the chairship be permanently shared by two persons who occupied different “sexual subject positions.” The motion was passed by the SSSG’s membership and is now part of the nationally sanctioned SSSG’s bylaws of the AAG. While technically the rule might result in two men or two women serving as co-chairs (the possibilities are many), it seemed likely at the very least that the stipulation would promote awareness of gender diversity issues.
But tensions amongst queer folk continue, which in large part inspired me to give a paper at a recent annual meeting of the AAG called, “Queer Patriarchy, International,” a paper suggesting that many privileged queer white men in certain postindustrial contexts assume positions of privilege, as did white men of industrial old (see Nast this issue). At the end of the paper session, the discussant came up to me and queried why I seemed so angry, noting that my anger seemed problematic; the issues I raised (it was implied) might be expressions of deeply rooted, highly personal anxieties displaced unfairly onto gay white men. What about the liberatory possibilities arising out of gay maleness, such as new ways of imagining the male body as penetrable and of gay male participation in otherwise feminine activities and professions?1 Since that encounter, I have spent much time thinking about those comments, re-asking myself the same and other questions, in the process realizing that my anxieties stem
from ongoing structural inequalities within a community in which I am invested.

Professional Geographer, 2000

This paper argues that calls for multicultural curricula in universities across the US can be met... more This paper argues that calls for multicultural curricula in universities across the US can be met with strategic curric-ular interventions that radically confront gendered racisms across regional, national, and international racial formations. Faculty who risk making such interventions should plan for student and institutional resistances. Intersecting consumer and corporate interests desire universities to be socially nonconflictual and economical places of leisure and entertainment, not sites of critical intervention. Accordingly, we theorize how and why faculty committed to opposi-tional multiculturalism might be cast as transgressive. In so doing, we pay particular attention to how identity politics are quadrangulated through embodiment, performance, time, and place. We additionally discuss ways for systematically working against the grain of gendered racisms and for supporting those who are teaching multiculturalism (critically) or seen to embody it. Working against the grain is particularly important as we enter the 21st century, given the increasing diversification of faculty and student bodies in universities across the US and the attendant risks " diverse " persons take, risks generally not experienced or acknowledged by White Americans.

Dissertation, 1992

This dissertation examines the changing spatiality of the massive Islamic palace of Kano, norther... more This dissertation examines the changing spatiality of the massive Islamic palace of Kano, northern Nigeria, from 1500, when King Rumfa first built it, to 1990. The largest Islamic palace in Africa, it has design elements similar to those of the Topkapi palace of Istanbul. Both housed 2000 or more persons, which included an extensive slave retinue that, amongst many other things, controlled the state treasury, army, and granaries, and that carried out all manner of work related to everyday palace life. The dissertation makes plain how eunuch bodies, though castrated, could be sexually signified depending on their respective duties and how concubines (slave women bearing children for the king) outranked ordinary slave women but were under the jurisdiction of the four royal wives. Of greatest significance, it points to how Islam heightened the ontological authority of the 'father' by awarding freedom to concubine children, something not possible for the children or ordinary slave women and men. The early nineteenth century saw a regional Islamic jihad waged against a kingdom understood as un-Islamic. The new rulers removed powerful women from office, filling these offices with men. With the making of a regional caliphate came a new regionalized army whose responsibilities for consolidating and growing territory usurped the reproductive powers of concubines to create children that could be used to forge alliance through marriage. The British, who took over the region in 1903, felt threatened by the formidable powers of state slaves whom they would eventually vanquish to the countryside. By contrast, they supported concubine life as a means of demonstrating publicly their respect of local culture. Unable to wage war, store regional wealth, or keep all taxes, the political economic authority of Kano rulers was substantially weakened, a weakening that accelerated with independence in 1960 and the changes that followed.

Servants of the Dynasty, 2008

The chapter presents preliminary historical geographic data from three sites discovered in and ne... more The chapter presents preliminary historical geographic data from three sites discovered in and near the ancient city-state of Kano in northern Nigeria, that shows that as early as the 1500s, royal concubines in the Kano palace held exclusive rights over the production of indigo-dyed cloth; and that they did so because of indigo blue's association with human and earthly fertility over which royalty was understood to have control. The data suggest that over subsequent centuries, royal and non royal women across Hausaland (a linguistic region straddling Nigeria and Niger of which Kano was a leading economic and cultural part) began producing indigo-dyed cloth for domestic and commercial purposes. It was only after a reformist jihad in the 1800s that men effectively wrested industry control away from royal and nonroyal women alike.

African Affairs, 2008

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Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1996

Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 1994

INTRODUCTION State slavery was historically central to the stability and growth of individual emi... more INTRODUCTION State slavery was historically central to the stability and growth of individual emirates in the Sokoto caliphate of northern Nigeria, an area overlapping much of the linguistic sub-region known as Hausaland (Fig. 1). Male slaves, who formed the backbone of state ...

The Professional Geographer, 2000

Spaces through the Body, 1998

This chapter reworks notions of reflexivity, exploring how it can be considered as a process thro... more This chapter reworks notions of reflexivity, exploring how it can be considered as a process through which bodies and places, always mutually constitutive, are continuously and relationally negotiated in ways that decenter subjectivity. Negotiations are out of anyone's control, the making of bodies and places being partial, ephemeral, unsynchronized, and incomplete; the subject is only momentarily stabilized through highly contingent processes that involve being and becoming a 'place' of (and for), chaotic, multiply directed, and multi-scalar demands, expectations, and practices. I argue, accordingly, that 'reflexivity' in cross-cultural fieldwork is about allowing ourselves to be epistemologically disciplined by the unknown, which impresses us from the outside. It is about learning to accept, reject, and respond physically to externalities and subjectivities in ways that allow us to better entertain difference. In this sense, reflexivity is less about self-introspection, self-reflection, "self-conscious practices...in thinking and writing" or self-emanating contemplation of how one "positions and includes oneself in relation to a subject os study" (Marcus 1992, 489; as it is characteristically defined in the social sciences) than about learning to recognize others' constructions of us through 'their' initiatives, spaces, bodies, judgements, prescriptions, proscriptions, and so on. In metaphorical and material terms, reflexivity is about allowing our 'bodies' to become 'places' for 'fielding difference.

Geographical Review, 2001

Feminism & Psychology, 2008

Dialogues in Human Geography, 2018

Routledge eBooks, Sep 5, 1996

Progress in Human Geography, 2000

Page 1. http://phg.sagepub.com/ Progress in Human Geography http://phg.sagepub. com/content/24/1/... more Page 1. http://phg.sagepub.com/ Progress in Human Geography http://phg.sagepub. com/content/24/1/170.citation The online version of this article can be found at: DOI: 10.1191/030913200674264878 2000 24: 170 Prog Hum ...

The AAG Review of Books, 2016

Social & Cultural Geography, 2016

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2000

Servants of the DynastyPalace Women in World History, 2008

Assemblage, 1994

This project centers on two different sorts of housing projects in Lexington, Kentucky: one in an... more This project centers on two different sorts of housing projects in Lexington, Kentucky: one in an affluent subdivision (Hartland) and two federally funded low-income housing projects (Bluegrass-Aspendale and Westminster Village). The project emerges from a shared ...

Progress in Human Geography, 2002

Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 1999

Gender, Place & Culture, 1998

ABSTRACT

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1996

It has been largely overlooked that Henri Lefebvre in his book The Production of Space draws heav... more It has been largely overlooked that Henri Lefebvre in his book The Production of Space draws heavily upon Lacanian psychoanalytic accounts of the emergence of subjectivity in theorizing political relations, Lefebvre implicitly repudiates at the same time that he builds upon Lacan's distinctions between real, imaginary, and symbolic registers of subjectivity. For Lefebvre, Lacan's registers give primacy to visuality and heterosexualized familial dynamics while lived material, spatial, and political experience arc incidental to subject formation and systems of meaning Lefebvre transforms Lacan's registers by historicizing them in spatially dialectical terms, loosely replacing them with distinct forms of evolutionary spatialities which he calls natural, absolute, and abstract, In the process, he both subverts and reproduces Lacan's paternal–maternal (heterosexual) order. We hold that Lefebvrc's critique provides powerful theoretical tools for understanding how alter...