Description
Book SynopsisAn interpretive history of the way competing ideas of reproduction as a biological and sexual process became central to the organization of knowledge about the flow of capital, labor power, human bodies, and babies both within nations and across national borders
Trade Review“Alys Eve Weinbaum offers an array of transformative reassessments of major canonical texts of literature, social theory, and science, marking the heretofore unrecognized centrality of what she calls the ‘race/reproduction bind’ to these texts.
Wayward Reproductions is an important book with substantial political as well as scholarly implications.”—Miranda Joseph, author of
Against the Romance of Community“I cannot imagine a more ambitious or important project.
Wayward Reproductions provides new and exciting readings and interpretations of some of the foundational texts of modern intellectual thought. Alys Eve Weinbaum theorizes reproduction as a concept that weaves race and sex together and in so doing constructs or resists nationalism.”—Gail Bederman, author of
Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917“What is very brilliant about this book is the way it opens readers’ eyes to specific ways of seeing the work of racialization and its distinctive role in ideas of nationalism not only within a number of classic texts but also in the critical traditions built up around them. The object lesson here is a very politically powerful one.”—Sarah Franklin, coeditor of
Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Geneaology Unbound: Reproduction and Contestation of the Racial Nation 15
2. Writing Feminist Geneaology: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Reproduction of Racial Nationalism 61
3. Engels’s Originary Ruse: Race and Reproduction in the Story of Capital 106
4. Sexual Selection and the Birth of Psychoanalysis: Darwin, Freud, and the Universalization of Wayward Reproduction 145
5. The Sexual Politics of Black Internationalism: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Reproduction of Racial Globality 187
Coda: Gene/alogies for a New Millennium 227
Notes 247
Works Cited 307
Index 339
