Heather Latimer
Email: heather.latimer@manchester.ac.uk
I graduated with a PhD in English from Simon Fraser University in 2010 and immediately joinedManchester and RICC as a postdoctoral fellow. My doctoral dissertation, which I am currently turning into a book, focuses on literary and filmic representations of abortion, surrogacy, cloning, and other reproductive politics in North America since the 1980s. My research interests include: feminist theory, contemporary film and literature, reproductive politics, psychoanalysis, representationsof citizenship, refugee status, and human rights.
My current research project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSRCH), is titled The Fetus and the Refugee: New Citizenship in Contemporary Film and Visual Media. It examines how the figure of the fetus currently aligns with the figure of the refugee as limit cases for how we imagine citizenship rights in a world marked by the “politics of terror.” There has been a change in how we understand human rights in connection to state security since 9/11, and this change relates to the resurgence of “family values” in America, especially, but also to global reproductive politics. I trace some of these changes as they appear in visual culture in order to analyze how these two icons, the fetus and the refugee, currently play into changing concepts of who or what is considered worthy of state protection. I argue that the refugee’s political position is akin to the fetus’ position, albeit on the other end of the political spectrum; these two figures act as opposing limits to the ways we imagine citizenship in that the fetus, not yet alive but often fully monitored and protected by the state, sits at the opposite end of the political spectrum as the refugee, fully alive but often ignored and abandoned by the state. I use contemporary film, as well as other visual narratives and media representations, as opportunities to think critically about how these two figures circulate, both in connection to each other, and in connection to global trends that are not only seeing the movement of people across state borders, but unprecedented surveillance of these same people. My project will explore why it is so often on the level of reproductive policy that biopolitics takes on gendered and racialized dimensions, especially in the management of who, or what, is defined as a fetus, a person, and a citizen.
Publications
'Popular Culture and Reproductive Politics: Juno, Knocked Up and the Enduring Legacy of The Handmaid’s Tale.' Feminist Theory 10.2 (2009): 209-224.
'Eating, Abjection and Transformation in the Work of Hiromi Goto', Thirdspace: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Culture 5.2 (2006). 1 October 2008. view online.
'Hybridity and Whiteness in Claudine C. O'Hearn's Half and Half: Writings on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural'. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 7.3 (2005). 1 October 2008. view online.
Forthcoming
'Reproductive Technologies, Fetal Icons, and Genetic Freaks: Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and the Limits and Possibilities of the Cyborg'. Forthcoming in Modern Fiction Studies.