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My current research interests are in the United States, and are as follows: the social/cultural meaning of pharmaceuticals, the technology of sexually transmitted disease (std) prevention; the social/cultural meaning of medical interventions, social suffering, kinship, paternity, queer families, sexuality and gender. My most recent and future work looks at the ways pharmaceutical technologies are folded into everyday relationships to understand the larger question of bio-social technologies in subject formation and intimacy. My current interests arise from fieldwork I conducted in the city of Baltimore as a post-doctoral research fellow in the Department of Infectious Disease at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine on the relationship between chemical dependency, incarceration, and sexually transmitted disease. I am currently finalizing a completed book-length manuscript titled ’Inqueeries’: Tracing the Reproductive Legacies of Gay Men’. The book is drawn from two years of fieldwork I conducted with gay fathers living on the Eastern Seaboard of the US from 1999 to 2001. In the manuscript, I ask about the meaning of fatherhood when paternity can no longer be understood as tied to procreative heterosexuality and clear pronouncements of the law. I address how the anxiety associated with coming to know the existence of a paternal relation is assuaged when the signing of legal contracts and the public performance of care come to replace anatomical birth as the singular event marking the creation of fathers. My analysis challenges the current depiction of same sex families as embodying a spirit of resistance in the pursuit of an alternative, or ¨new¨, mode of relatedness to that associated with the normative family. Rather, I investigate the costs entailed in desiring to belong in a family - in terms of the willingness to suffer - when given the reliance of contemporary state formations on biological notions of relatedness. The work comments upon the experience of family in general and embraces the idea that paternity for gay men is not wholly defined by the place of the exception within the rules of heterosexual reproduction.
My more resent research investigates pharmaceutical technologies and their place in the technical imaginaries found in the field of public health and its efforts to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted infections. I am interested in the multiple affects, forms of dependency and care that arise from the use, development, and circulation of pharmaceuticals - both legal and illegal - and how such forms of life intersect with institutional ethical discourses oriented towards stopping the spread of sexually transmitted infections. The work focuses on the experience and meaning of bio-medical interventions for those who are pictured as being at a heightened risk for contracting sexually transmitted diseases and HIV - such as intravenous drug users, the incarcerated, and those whose lives are lived in the margins of urban settings in America. My future goal is to understand how institutional notions of success and failure hinge with the technological imaginaries found in biomedicine to constitute the meaning and experience of intimacy and the relation of life to death in sexuality. Current CV |
