Cookie Consent by FreePrivacyPolicy.com
JAAAS logo

Special Issue Introduction

Vol. 4 No. 1 (2022): American Studies as Vulnerability Studies

American Studies as Vulnerability Studies: Introduction

Submitted
July 21, 2023
Published
2022-12-30

Abstract

This special issue explores the ambivalent nature of vulnerability as a "politically produced" condition of suffering which contains the potential for resistance and consequential social change for minoritized individuals and communities. Judith Butler's now-classic rendering of vulnerability as "unequally distributed through and by a differential operation of power" helps us better grasp interrelated forms of oppression, yet we argue that narratives of vulnerability also foreground the relational and interconnected conditions of vulnerable lives, while at the same time engendering worldmaking projects centered around agency and resistance.

References

  1. Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2010.
  2. Anzaldúa, Gloria E. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 1987.
  3. Anzaldúa, Gloria E. "Haciendo caras, una entrada." In Making Face, Making Soul / Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color, edited by Gloria E. Anzaldúa, xv-xxvii. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 1990.
  4. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
  5. Biggs, Hazel, and Caroline Jones. "Legally Vulnerable: What is Vulnerability and Who is Vulnerable?" In Law and Global Health: Current Legal Issues 16, ed. Michael Freeman, Sarah Hawkes, and Belinda Bennett, 133-148. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
  6. Bracke, Sarah. "Bouncing Back: Vulnerability and Resistance in Times of Resilience." In Vulnerability in Resistance, edited by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, 52-75. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
  7. Brinkema, Eugenie. The Forms of the Affects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
  8. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Silence. London: Verso Books, 2004.
  9. Butler, Judith. "Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance." In Vulnerability in Resistance, edited by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, 12-27. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
  10. Butler, Judith, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay. "Introduction." In Vulnerability in Resistance, edited by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, 1-11. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
  11. Cameron, Emilie S. "Securing Indigenous Politics: A Critique of the Vulnerability and Adaptation Approach to the Human Dimensions of Climate Change in the Canadian Arctic." Global Environmental Change 22, no. 1 (2012): 103-114. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.11.004.
  12. Cutter, Susan L. "The Geography of Social Vulnerability: Race, Class, and Catastrophe." In Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences. New York: Social Science Research Council, 2006.
  13. Fineman, Martha A. "The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition." Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 20, no. 1 (2008).
  14. Frenyo, Edit. "Unsafe from Any Angle: Vulnerability-Generation on the US–Canada Border." Laws 11, no. 3 (2022). https://doi.org/10.3390/laws11030044.
  15. Frisso, Giovanna. "Vulnerability, Arctic Indigenous Groups and Oil Spills." Yearbook of International Disaster Law Online 3, no. 1 (2022): 352-73. https://doi.org/10.1163/26662531_00301_014.
  16. Garland-Thompson, Rosemarie. "Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept." Hypathia 26, no. 3 (2011): 591-609. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01206.x.
  17. Gomberg-Muñoz, Ruth. "Willing to Work: Agency and Vulnerability in an Undocumented Immigrant Network." American Anthropologist 112, no. 2 (2010): 295-307. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2010.01227.x.
  18. Gopinath, Gayatri. Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.
  19. Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. Edinburgh: AK Press, 2020).
  20. Haalboom, Bethany, and David C. Natcher. "The Power and Peril of ‘Vulnerability’: Approaching Community Labels with Caution in Climate Change Research." Arctic 65, no. 3 (2012): 319-327. https://doi.org/10.14430/arctic4219.
  21. Hamrouni, Naïma. "Ordinary Vulnerability, Institutional Androgyny, and Gender Justice." In Vulnerability, Autonomy, and Applied Ethics, edited by Christine Straehle, 75-88. New York: Routledge, 2016.
  22. Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013.
  23. Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008.
  24. Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. New York: Norton, 2019.
  25. Hesford, Wendy S., and Rachel A. Lewis. "Mobilizing Vulnerability: New Directions in Transnational Feminist Studies and Human Rights." Feminist Formations 28, no. 1 (2016): vii-xviii. https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2016.0012.
  26. Hirsch, Marianne. "Vulnerable Times." In Vulnerability in Resistance, edited by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, 76-96. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
  27. Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: New York University Press, 2020.
  28. Jones, Shermaine M. "'I Can't Breathe!': Affective Asphyxia in Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric." South: A Scholarly Journal 50, no. 1 (2017): 37-45.
  29. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Dordrecht: Springer, 1974
  30. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.
  31. Mackenzie, Catriona, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds. "Introduction: What Is Vulnerability, and Why Does it Matter for Moral Theory?" In Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, edited by Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds, 1-29. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
  32. Maschelein, Anneleen, Florian Mussgnug, and Jennifer Rushworth. "Introduction: On/Off Limits." In Mediating Vulnerability: Comparative Approaches and Questions of Genre, edited by Anneleen Masschelein, Florian Mussgnug, and Jennifer Rushworth, 1-16. London: UCL Press, 2021.
  33. Oliviero, Katie E. Vulnerability Politics: The Uses and Abuses of Precarity in Political Debate. New York: New York University Press, 2018.
  34. Palmer, Tyrone S. "Otherwise than Blackness: Feeling, World, Sublimation." Qui Parle 29, no. 2 (2020): 247-83. https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-8742983.
  35. Palmer, Tyrone S. "'What Feels More Than Feeling?': Theorizing the Unthinkability of Black Affect." Critical Ethnic Studies 3, no. 2 (2017): 31-56. https://doi.org/10.5749/jcritethnstud.3.2.0031.
  36. Ricœur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
  37. Sabsay, Leticia. "Permeable Bodies: Vulnerability, Affective Powers, Hegemony." In Vulnerability in Resistance, ed. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, 278-302. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
  38. Satz, Ani B. "Vulnerability." In Keywords for Disability Studies, edited by Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin, 185-86. New York: New York University Press, 2015.
  39. Scully, Jackie Leach. "Disability and Vulnerability: On Bodies, Dependence, and Power." In Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, edited by Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds, 204-221. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
  40. Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
  41. Teixeira, Mariana. "The Periphery and Its Ambiguities: Vulnerability as a Critical Concept for Feminist Social Theory." In De-Centering Global Sociology: The Peripheral Turn in Social Theory and Research, edited by Arthur Buen, Mariana Teixeira, and David Strecker, 82-95. New York: Routledge, 2022.
  42. Tomasini, Floris. Vulnerable Bodies: New Directions in Disability Studies. London: Palgrave Pivot, 2019.
  43. Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
  44. Wanzo, Rebecca. The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling. Albany: SUNY Press, 2015.
  45. Yao, Xine. Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.

Similar Articles

41-50 of 105

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.