Progressive Geographies

The final schedule for the conference at Purdue this weekend has been posted. Not only am I going, but I’ve found myself moderating a panel on which Marcelo Hoffman and Marco Altamirano will be presenting. Of particular interest is the forthcoming online publication of a transcription, and I presume a translation, of Deleuze’s 1979-80 seminar “Appareils d’Etat et Machines de Guerre” (Apparatuses of State and War Machines). I’ll post details from West Lafayette, Indiana as I learn more.

Jemima Repo (2015) The Biopolitics of Gender. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press

• Introduces a new theoretical and methodological approach to gender
• Conducts a genealogy of gender similar to Foucault’s mid-twentieth century genealogy of sexuality
• Argues that gender is an apparatus of biopower invented in the postwar period in order to regulate the reproduction of capital and population
• Demonstrates how gender forges biopolitical connections between sexology, psychiatry, feminism, demography, economics, and public policy
• Reconsiders the emancipatory potential of the idea of gender for feminist theory and politics today

Description
Michel Foucault identified sexuality as one of the defining biopolitical technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Jemima Repo argues in this book, “gender” has come to be the major sexual signifier of the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first century. In fact, in this historical excavation of the biopolitical significance of the term, she argues that it could not…

A bit belatedly, after getting a number of ‘Does Matt Damon know what he’s talking about?’ emails, I finally got to see The Martian last night. Since it’s not fair that Klaus Dodds and Rachael Squire get to have all the fun analysing this month’s movies, I thought I’d take a stab at parsing the international law beneath The Martian.

The United Nations meets The Martian