Developments among International Scientific and Health Bodies on Dual-Use Issue

Presentation at the Controlling Dangerous Pathogens Project Regional Workshop on Dual-Use Research, Teresopolis, Brazil

Viral Bodies: Uncontrollable Blackness in Popular Culture and Everyday Life

Viral Bodies: Uncontrollable Blackness in Popular Culture and Everyday Life maps rapidly circulated performances of Blackness across visual media that collapse Black bodies into ubiquitous “things.” Throughout my dissertation, I use viral performance to describe the uncontrollable discursive circulation of bodies, their behaviors, and the ideas around them. In particular, viral performance is employed to describe the complicated ways that (mis)understandings of Black bodies spread and are often transformed into common-sense beliefs. As viral performances, Black bodies are often made more visible, while simultaneously becoming more opaque. This dissertation examines the recurrence of viral performances of Blackness in viral videos online, film, and photography/images. I argue that viral performances make products that reinscribe stereotypical notions of Blackness while also generating paths of alterity—which contradict the normalized clichés and provide desirable possibilities for Black performance. Viral Bodies forges a new dialogue between visual and aural technologies, performance, and larger historic discourses that script Black bodies as visually (and sonically) deviant subjects. I am interested in how technologies complicate the re-presentation of images, ideas, and ideologies—producing a necessity for new decipherings of performances of Blackness in popular culture and everyday life.

Bodies on the Line: Violence, Disposable Subjects, and the US-Mexico Border Industrial Complex

Bodies On the Line: Violence, Disposable Subjects, and the Border Industrial Complex explores the construction of identity and notions of belonging within an increasingly privatized and militarized Border Industrial Complex. Specifically, the project interrogates how discourses of Mexican migrants as racialized, gendered, and hypersexualized “deviants” normalize violence against border crossers. Starting at Juárez/El Paso border, I follow the expanding border, interrogating the ways that Mexican migrants, regardless of sexual orientation, have been constructed and disciplined according to racialized notions of “sexual deviance." I engage a queer of color critique to argue that sexual deviance becomes a justification for targeting and containing migrant subjects. By focusing on the economic and racially motivated violence that the Border Industrial Complex does to Mexican migrant communities, I expand the critiques that feminists of color have long leveraged against systemic violence done to communities of color through the prison industrial system. Importantly, this project contributes to transnational feminist scholarship by contextualizing border violence within the global circuits of labor, capital, and ideology that shape perceptions of border insecurity. The project contributes an interdisciplinary perspective that uses a multi-method approach to understand how border violence is exercised against Mexicans at the Mexico-US border. I use archival methods to ask how historical records housed at the National Border Patrol Museum and Memorial Library serve as political instruments that reinforce the contemporary use of violence against Mexican migrants. I also use semi-structured interviews with nine frequent border crossers to consider the various ways crossers defined and aligned themselves at the border. Finally, I analyze the master narratives that come to surround specific cases of border violence. To that end, I consider the mainstream media’s coverage, legal proceedings, and policy to better understand the racialized, gendered, and sexualized logics of the violence.