Browsing by Author "Hollingshead, David"
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Item Domestic ecology and autoimmunity: eugenic feminism in the sixth extinction(2022) Hollingshead, DavidInitially hailed as an ur-text for feminist scholarship upon its first reprint in 1973, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892) has undergone a significant historicist reevaluation, beginning in the 1990s, which condemned the story on behalf of its author’s investments in eugenic feminism, the view that women’s reproductive roles should be weaponized as a tool of white supremacy through the enforcement of “racial hygiene.”[1] Central to these revisionist accounts is the claim that Gilman’s racism hinges upon an appeal to purity, what Jennifer Fleissner calls “the obsessive demarcation of boundaries,” wherein whiteness figures as an immaculate, sterilized sanctum threatened by incursions from an unclean milieu of less-evolved lifeforms.[2] Contemporary with new historicism, the burgeoning fields of science and technology studies, posthumanism, and ecocriticism were pursuing a complementary though reverse line of thinking: that challenging anthropocentric understandings of the human as ontologically distinct from nonhuman nature (through concepts such as hybridity, nature-cultures, and intra-actions) was both a necessary precondition for and, in some cases, coextensive with, antiracist theorization.[3] Both presumptions require rethinking. First, purity is an inaccurate rubric for understanding Gilman’s eugenic feminism, which is better characterized by its ecological orientation, wherein the human subject is ineluctably enmeshed with and co-constituted through its nonhuman environment. For Gilman, white supremacy was sustained rather than threatened by such a relational ontology. And second, by virtue of Gilman’s continued influence today, humanities scholarship needs to abandon the assumption that appeals to an entangled world of human and nonhuman actors is necessarily the foundation of progressive politics.Item The Parasitology Unbound Collective: commission report(2020) Hollingshead, DavidThis interdisciplinary commission was formed to assess and respond to the sudden collapse of the Parasitology Unbound Collective, a research initiative supported by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in partnership with the National Health Association (NHA). The Collective was conceived as a comprehensive three-year program to study the effects of the common brain parasite Toxoplasma gondii on human behavior and psychology. However, the operation was forced to shut down less than two years into its projected timeline for reasons that are still under investigation. The following report was written in affiliation with the A/N/I/M/A/C/I/E/S/ ROOM (“A Room for Sciences Studies in Action”) at Alberta Regional University. It compiles a record of the events leading up to and including the incident at the Collective’s primary testing facility in Beltsville, Maryland, on May 20, 2019, and the contemporaneous disappearance of lead researcher Charles Wilson along with seven (7) live cats infected with toxoplasmosis. This record contains primary documentation, beginning with Dr. Wilson’s NHA grant application, and includes correspondences between NHA officials and Wilson, as well as excerpts from private journals and other miscellaneous documents recovered from the Beltsville facility. In order to secure its publication in ASAP/ Journal, the commission has taken the opportunity to provide relevant contextualizing documents, including discursive paratextual notes and additional secondary scholarship, when necessary. The paratextual notes were written by two ARU graduate students who were hired as summer researchers.Item Women, insects, modernity: American domestic ecologies in the late nineteenth century(2020) Hollingshead, DavidDuring the latter half of the nineteenth century, developments in the fields of public health and domestic science transformed the modern home into a space of dangerous multispecies entanglements. In response, state-sponsored hygiene initiatives aimed at the reproduction of white futurity recruited housekeepers as domestic guardians against nature's encroachments. However, a cohort of women writers and scientists had also begun to take the home's biological heterogeneity as the starting point for a new science that challenged these mandates. This essay introduces the term domestic ecology to refer to a minoritarian strain of US nineteenth-century material and intellectual history that grasps the biodiversity of the modern home as an occasion for novel scientific inquiry and critique that has gone underexamined in both cultural histories of domesticity as well as contemporary ecocriticism. Far from the prophylactic project of “keeping the world clean” ascribed to domestic workers in the wake of the germ theory, domestic ecology takes women's imbrication with the lively, messy materiality of the home as its vital principle rather than a relation to be sanitized or sublimated. This essay demonstrates how domestic ecology worked to circumvent the imperial anthropocentrism of domestic science and challenge its marginalization of women's labor.