Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought

An 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 Wayward Reproductions breaks apart and transfigures prevailing understandings of the interconnection among ideologies of racism, nationalism, and imperialism. It demonstrates how these ideologies were founded in large part on what Alys Eve Weinbaum calls the race/reproduction bind - the notion that race is something that is biologically reproduced. In revealing the centrality of ideas about women’s reproductive capacity to modernity’s intellectual foundations, Weinbaum highlights the role that these ideas have played in naturalizing oppression. She argues that attention to how the race/reproduction bind is perpetuated across national and disciplinary boundaries is a necessary part of efforts to combat racism. Gracefully traversing a wide range of discourses - including literature, evolutionary theory, early anthropology, Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis - Weinbaum traces a genealogy of the race/reproduction bind within the key intellectual formations of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She examines two major theorists of genealogical thinking - Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault - and unearths the unacknowledged ways their formulations link race and reproduction.