Papers by Stephanie Clare
Hypatia
Drawing on a rich archive including the work of Gilles Deleuze, the writing of Jeanette Winterson... more Drawing on a rich archive including the work of Gilles Deleuze, the writing of Jeanette Winterson, and personal experience, Queer and Deleuzian Temporalities argues that we ought to understand time in terms of a living present. This understanding, Loewen Walker claims, has affordances in the context of social justice most broadly, and for feminist, queer, indigenous, and environmental politics more specifically. The monograph joins (and addresses) many other works about the affordances of Deleuze's approach to time for feminist philosophy, including writing by Elizabeth Grosz, Claire Colebrook, and Rosi Braidotti. In Loewen Walker's vision, to understand the present as living is to see it as a "contraction of the past and an anticipation of the future" (4). The present is "thick with every past," Loewen Walker writes; it also stretches to the future through anticipation (52). The author gives the example of learning to ride a bike as a seven-year-old. On the one hand, this moment draws on past experience or is a materialization of the past, its contraction: the rider has learned the rhythm of pedaling, for instance. She pushes one foot after the next. The road is there; the bike has been made. The past contracts to make this moment. At the same time, the present is anticipatory: the biker's present action shapes what might come next. She might crash into the sidewalk, for instance, in a moment of distraction. For Loewen Walker, the present is living in that "it actually changes the past and future of self and other through continuous, reverberating waves" (4). That is to say, if the ride is successful, the past is imagined as developing a useful habit. If not, the past is lacking: previous actions or the bike itself is insufficient in some way. The present then holds immense potentiality: not simply a culmination of the past but an active shaping of it, not simply a moment toward the future, but a moment of potential becoming toward a future as yet unknown and unformed. A central argument here is that time does not "preexist the world in which we live, the systems of communication and time-keeping through which it is read" (12). Instead, as we tell stories in the present, we make time, positing a past and anticipating a future. This should not be understood as a form of idealism, however. Loewen Walker reads Deleuze and Winterson through new feminist materialism, especially the work of Karen Barad, and indigenous ways of knowing, such as the work of Juan Alejandro Chindoy Chindoy, to claim that we make time in the stories we tell. But the stories themselves emerge as part of material intra-actions: they involve storytellers, audiences,
The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory
This chapter provides an overview to central contributions to feminist theory published in 2022. ... more This chapter provides an overview to central contributions to feminist theory published in 2022. It focuses on three topics around which many contributions congealed: (1) the relationship between transgender and feminist praxis; (2) ecofeminist approaches to violence; and finally (3) feminism’s entanglements with neoliberalism. The chapter outlines the contexts of the publications’ interventions and speculates about what might come next.
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
This roundtable analyzes the first genome-wide association study (GWAS) that sought to identify t... more This roundtable analyzes the first genome-wide association study (GWAS) that sought to identify the genetic variations that correlate with same-sex sexual behavior. Drawing on over 450,000 individuals’ genetic material from the UK Biobank and 23andMe, the 2019 study concluded that “many loci with individually small effects,” which are spread across the entire genome, contribute in statistically significant but highly unreliable ways to an individual's sexual behavior. The study was thus greeted by geneticists, science journalists, and even some LGBTQ+ advocates as heralding the demise of the mythical “gay gene.” However, the study itself did not drive a stake through the heart of the “born this way” idea. In fact, the researchers framed their efforts as having revealed the “genetic architecture”—which is to say the blueprint or design—of same-sex sexual behavior. Stephanie Clare, Patrick R. Grzanka, and Joanna Wuest argue that the 2019 GWAS marks a moment of both flux and contin...
This autotheoretical Element, written in the tense space between feminist and trans theory, argue... more This autotheoretical Element, written in the tense space between feminist and trans theory, argues that movement between 'woman' and 'nonbinary' is possible, affectively and politically. In fact, a nonbinary structure of feeling has been central in the history of feminist thought, such as in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949). This structure of feeling is not antifeminist but indexical of a desire for a form of embodiment and relationality beyond binary sex and gender. Finally, the Element provides a partial defense of nonbinary gender identity by tracing the development of the term in online spaces of the early 2000s. While it might be tempting to read its development as symptomatic of the forms of selfhood reproduced in (neo)liberal, racialized platform capitalism, this reading is too simplistic because it misses how the term emerged within communities of care.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature
Two influential approaches to understanding sexuality emerged in the late 19th and early 20th cen... more Two influential approaches to understanding sexuality emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe: sexology and psychoanalysis. These approaches develop a method for thinking about human sexuality apart from religious discourse. Sexology births the concept of the congenital “homosexual,” often understanding this figure as pathological. In turn, psychoanalysis, as it was first developed by Sigmund Freud, considers infantile sexuality as polymorphous and perverse. It analyzes how this perversity develops into adult genders and sexualities, sometimes through the repression of drives that, even in their repressed form, continue to show effects. In both these models, sexuality is figured as a natural force, one that may come to be shaped by social and cultural milieus, but that is ultimately innate. Breaking from this tradition, Michel Foucault’s 1978 The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 offers a different, groundbreaking approach. Rather than arguing that sexuality is repr...
The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body
photocopy or other means, without the permission of the author.
This dissertation draws out a point of resonance between Frantz Fanon's and Luce Irigaray's philo... more This dissertation draws out a point of resonance between Frantz Fanon's and Luce Irigaray's philosophies: Fanon and Irigaray demonstrate how the philosophy of difference-be it racial and/or sexual difference-and the philosophy of power relations-be it the analysis of patriarchy and/or colonialism-not only bring attention to racialized and gendered others, they also bring attention to land and the earth. In both authors' works, abstract, homogenous empty space comes to the foreground, filled with the matter that constitutes it: earth, air, and land. The dissertation draws on Fanon's and Irigaray's treatment of space to reconsider central concepts that circulate in poststructuralist feminist thought: power, discourse, interiority, subjectivity, and sexuality. I read these concepts within the context of Canadian settler colonialism to foreground the politics of space. Most centrally, I argue that alongside the forms of power Michel Foucault analyzed at length exists another form of power, geopower, the force relations that transform the earth. I describe geopower through an analysis of the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Ultimately, "Earthly Encounters" contributes to feminist, antiracist thought by bringing attention not simply to sexual or racial difference but also to the material differences that make up our world: animal, plant, and mineral. Irene Revell, and honorary Sophie Green and Kivmars Bowling; the CSPT gang at UVic:
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2021
Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, 2014
Hypatia, 2009
This paper examines the temporality of agency in Judith Butler's and Saba Mahmood's writi... more This paper examines the temporality of agency in Judith Butler's and Saba Mahmood's writing. I argue that Mahmood moves away from a performative understanding of agency, which focuses on relations of signification, to a corporeal understanding, which focuses on desire and sensation. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's reading of Henri Bergson, I show how this move involves a changed model of becoming: whereas Butler imagines movement as a series of discontinuous beings, in Mahmood's case, we get an understanding of becoming.
By developing a Foucauldian understanding of the self, queer theorists may remodel conceptions of... more By developing a Foucauldian understanding of the self, queer theorists may remodel conceptions of selfhood such that forms of questioning identity, the body, coalitions, and recognition, which have presently arrived at an impasse, are opened to new lines of analysis. Foucault's use of "self' seems to reintroduce a model of selfhood that appears transhistorical, universal, disembodied, autopoietic, and associated with interioritya model of selfhood Foucault would likely attempt to transgress. However, against several critics, this thesis argues that while the self appears problematic in Foucault's writings, his analysis of ethics may be less problematically read. "Self' functions in these works to denote embodied, reflexive actions, which are both socially mediated and practiced. As such, the model of the self which Foucault establishes eludes the various traps laid out above, and opens a new path for confronting some key problems facing queer theory today.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2019
This essay develops a sideways reading of environmental epigenetics by contesting some of the soc... more This essay develops a sideways reading of environmental epigenetics by contesting some of the social and cultural norms that inform epigenetic research. Through this analysis, I seek to demonstrate how multiple communities of belonging—not just those considered family—become embodied. My reading of environmental epigenetics pushes beyond heteronormative understandings of biological relatedness and argues for a more collective—and feminist—understanding of inheritance, one that does not center heterosexuality, homonormativity, or the family and its privatization of care.
Uploads
Papers by Stephanie Clare