The Gender of Math

The politics of math are of newfound concern today, due to the outsize influence of algorithms and code in contemporary life. While only a few years ago, tech authors were still hawking Silicon Valley as the great hope for humanity, today one is more likely to hear how Big Tech increases social inequality, how algorithms are racist, and how math is a weapon. Do algorithms discriminate along gendered lines? Do mathematical systems harbor an essential bias? This essay shows that mathematics has long been defined through an elemental gendering, that within such typing there exists a prohibition on mixing the types, and that the two core types themselves (geometry and arithmetic) are mutually intertwined using notions of hierarchy, foreignness, and priority. The author concludes that whatever incidental biases it may display, mathematics also contains an essential bias.

Ontological Captivity

Departing from where Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Martin Heidegger’s gender-neutral Dasein left off, this article argues for “ontological captivity” as a critical analytic for questioning Being under conditions of racial capitalism. Based on a broad understanding of the Black Radical tradition, the author argues for the importance of connecting the analysis of ontological difference with the political critique of concrete historical and material conditions that structurally link what it means to be human to overlapping and mutually reinforcing technologies of capture. From the slave ship, the plantation, the reservation, the prison, the detention center, the penal colony, and the concentration camp to the ways in which injurious signifiers fix the body and arrest its mobility, ontological difference should be unthinkable outside a confrontation with its material conditions of possibility and impossibility. These are the material conditions that, from W. E. B. Du Bois’s analysis of the “color-line” to Calvin Warren’s analytic of “onticide,” from Lewis Gordon’s “antiblackness” to Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s “coloniality of being,” and from Hortense Spillers’s “being for the captor” to Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s “ontological plasticization,” call for a political rather than an ethical interrogation of Being.

Hot and Cool Mothers

“Hot and Cool Mothers” moves toward a media theory of mothering and parental “fitness.” The article begins with an investigation into midcentury pediatric psychological studies on Bad Mothers and their impacts on their children. The most famous, if not persistent, of these diagnoses is that of the so-called refrigerator mother. The refrigerator mother is not the only bad model of maternality that midcentury psychiatry discovered, however; overstimulating mothers, called in this study “hot mothers,” were identified as equally problematic. From the mid-1940s until the 1960s and beyond, class, race, and maternal function were linked in metaphors of temperature. Whereas autism and autistic states have been extensively elaborated in their relationship to digital media, this article attends to attributed maternal causes of “emotionally disturbed,” queer, and neurodivergent children. The author argues that these newly codified diagnoses were inseparable from midcentury conceptions of stimulation, mediation, domesticity, and race, including Marshall McLuhan’s theory of hot and cool media, as well as maternal absence and (over)presence, echoes of which continue in the present in terms like “helicopter parent.”

Conundrums in the House of Wailing

This essay examines widowhood rites and traditions in Northern Muslim Sudan, including those sanctioned by religion (that is, property inheritance and widows’ internment) and those endorsed by local communities. The microhistorical ethnographic accounts in this essay illustrate the deep psychological and physical suffering that narrators experienced as they navigated the labyrinth of socially sanctioned practices in their communities. They also communicate lessons about deep structures of power and the blurred boundaries of religion and ritual. The narratives reveal that despite the tenacity of male governance, female in-laws wield tremendous power in the rites that widows deem discriminatory. While interlocutors in this essay stress the near impossibility of a widow escaping the tentacles of authority and the empathy deficit stemming from it, others who have resisted these widowhood rituals show us how women can conjure the agency to negotiate both the bottlenecks and the thresholds in their paths.

Policing (as) the Paradigmatic Scene of Rape

A queer renovation of “rape” requires beginning not with actors, but with acts, which brings into view the central role of the state as a perpetrator of sexual violence. Radical feminists moved the “paradigmatic scene” of rape from the stranger in the alley to the acquaintance in the bedroom: rape was a problem not of exceptional perversion, but of ordinary heterosexuality. The works surveyed in this essay center the scene of state detention, showing how regimes of policing in a racial capitalist state always frame and prototype sexual violence. The author pursues this argument in three passes: history (the discourse around Michel Foucault’s treatment of the Charles Jouy case), aesthetics (the conflation of state and domestic violence in the installations of Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum), and activism (the convergence of abolitionist and antirape movements in the 1970s writings of Angela Davis and the memoirs of the Scottsboro Boys).

Mistresses as Masters?

Recent texts in the historiography of slavery have focused on slave-owning women in an attempt to overturn the paradigm of the benevolent mistress. While “benevolence” has silenced and exceptionalized mistresses’ violence, newer interpretations draw from slave testimony to establish forms of equivalence between the power of the mistress and that of the master. Because this normalization of white women’s power nonetheless relies on standards of historiographical interpretation—the predominance of political economy, the imperatives of affect and agency—it does not sufficiently access how historiographical methods participate in stabilizing gender and pathologizing black rage. This article proposes that the difference between the mistress and master is a fantasy necessary to the circulation of the libidinal economy of slavery. In doing so, it pursues an inquiry into the pleasures of interpretation and speculates on the ways historiography invests in the white woman in order to extend its interlocutory life.

Protest without End

In the aftermath of crushed political revolution, forms of protest become curiously circular and conflicted. Drawing on literary and visual representations of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, this essay analyzes new circuits of demands that break with the project of successful revolutionary ends and demonstrate an investment in the satisfying interminability of protest that cannot be suppressed or punished. It brings into view a range of protesting figures engaged in an ongoing alteration of the colonial relation to argue that the eccentric gaps between process and purpose are useful for thinking through the satisfactions of anticolonialism.

Rereading Rape in the Critical Canon

This essay identifies what the author terms “adjudicative reading,” a tendency in literary criticism to read novels depicting sexual violence as if in a court of law. Adjudicative reading tracks characters’ motivations and the physical outcomes of their actions as if novels can offer evidence, or lack thereof, of criminal conduct. This legalistic style of criticism not only ignores the fictionality of incidences of rape in novels, but it replicates the prejudices inherent in historical rape law by centering the experiences of the accused character over and against the harm caused to the fictional victim of rape. By contrast, the “capacious” conception of rape proposed here refuses to locate rape in a particular bodily act (as the law does), rejects the yoking of rape’s harms to a particular gender, and understands various forms of violence as equally serious (rather than creating a hierarchy of sexual assault, as current legal conceptions tend to do).

The Resistance to Overanalysis

“The Resistance to Overanalysis” carefully analyzes the rhetoric that the business community, the self-help industry, and mass culture more generally use to pathologize overanalysis as an unhelpful, counterproductive practice that inhibits people’s efforts at reaching their goals and becoming happy, successful citizens. Focusing on the persistent stereotype that associates academics and intellectuals (particularly in the humanities) with overanalysis, the essay offers a critique of the anti-intellectual conventions that underlie denunciations of overanalysis. It also demonstrates how those conventions, and the ideological values they reinforce, have been echoed, from within the academic humanities, by what has been dubbed “postcritique.” The essay makes a case for why intellectuals in the humanities must exercise caution when it comes to adopting the values that the postcritique movement promotes, given the way those values subtend the populist, even fascistic, anti-intellectual interests that also fuel the stigmatization of overanalysis.

The Promise of Oblivion

That forgetfulness constitutes a force detrimental to the ability of keeping promises is commonplace. Promises rely on a stable memory; in order to be realized they must be sheltered from the onslaught of oblivion. This article takes a closer look at the mutual exclusivity of promising and its forgetting— and discovers, at the very foundation of every promise, the unlikely expression of a promise of oblivion. Through readings of Sacher-Masoch, Nietzsche, Kafka, and others, this promise of oblivion emerges as the very condition of possibility of all promising: oblivion must be promised for promises to be. Thus, what on the surface seems mutually exclusive turns out essentially entangled: promising premised on oblivion. In a coda invoking Heidegger and Blanchot, the structure of language itself is revealed to be promissory—and, as such, forgetful.