Geraldine Pratt

In vitro fertilization (IVF) has transformed how we understand, study, and reproduce human life, generating novel biological entities and possibilities. This dissertation takes shape around one such novelty: the abnormal IVF embryo. Over the last decade, the diagnosis of embryonic abnormality has become central to fertility science and practice. Today, over one third of IVF embryos produced in the U.S. are designated abnormal on the basis of their genetic makeup. My project delves into the complex world of these vexed biological entities, examining the apparatuses through which they come into being and through which they are variably stripped of and imbued with value. Drawing on feminist and crip theory, feminist political economy, science and technology studies, and my own multi-site, multi-methods research, I ask: What worlds of knowledge might be read from the abnormal embryo?The dissertation makes three main arguments. First, it determines that IVF has precipitated a respatialization of reproduction from within to outside the body. Others have examined the subsequent geographical expansion of reproductive networks. But less attention has been paid to the deepening of the capitalist and scientific interest into the biotic space inside embryos – what I term “involution”. In the context of fertility treatment, involution has catalyzed the birth of the abnormal embryo that is my interest. The designation of embryos as abnormal on the basis of their genetic makeup reflects deeply held assumptions about the healthy bodies we are supposed (to want) to have and reproduce. This is my second major argument. Understandings of abnormality are steeped in socio-cultural ideals of health, able-bodiedness, neuro-typicality, and sexual dimorphism. The fertility clinic is thus a key – and until now, overlooked – site in the discursive and material reproduction of the normal, healthy body. Finally, I argue that the reproduction of the healthy body in this context is also productive for the bioeconomy. In addition to generating profits in the fertility clinic, embryo genetic screening has created a reserve of surplus embryos seen to have no future life potential. Classified as waste in the fertility clinic, these embryos have complex and contested afterlives as valuable technoscientific objects.

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This dissertation foregrounds that which has receded from view. On one hand, it is about the material effects of settler colonial logics of elimination; the disappearance of Indigenous women from settler archives and commissions and the separation of fish, water, and land. On the other, it is about the persistence of Indigenous relationships to fish, water, and family along the Salish Sea. This dissertation is structured around two main questions. First: What are the logics and materialities of settler archives? A second question follows: How is settler colonial occlusion and dispossession resisted and subverted by connections held by Indigenous women to water, fish, and family? To answer these questions, I develop a methodological approach that involves close collaboration with Rosemary Georgeson, a Coast Salish and Sahtu Dene fisherman, storyteller, and playwright. Much of the empirical work of this dissertation has centered on us finding her Indigenous grandmothers Tlahoholt and Sar-Augh-Ta-Naogh and reconnecting with their descendants. In the first part of the dissertation I trace the disappearance of Rosemary's Indigenous grandmothers and of Coast Salish women from archives, Commission transcripts, and local histories. In the second, I turn away from the settler archive and the stories that it animates to argue for the importance of refusing archival recovery. Instead, I turn towards collaborating with Rosemary to share part of the story of her family in relation to water, fish, and urbanization. This turning away takes two forms; a film (Chapter 6) and a co-authored article (Chapter 7). Ultimately, this thesis develops a unique decolonizing methodological approach to archival research that reveals the endurance of connections and strengthens Indigenous futurities. Supplementary materials available at: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/73444.

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Drawing on multi-sited qualitative fieldwork, this dissertation examines the recruitment and migration process of temporary migrants through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program for work in lower-skilled jobs in Western Canada. Situated in an understanding of Canada as a recruited nation, I trace shifts in immigration policy that prioritize economic development and which have led to more market-driven and temporary migration flows. With a focus on recruitment practices, the dissertation contributes to theorizations of the “migration industry.” I take third-party recruiters, labour market intermediaries who facilitate and regulate migrant flows, as an entry point for considering how practices of gatekeeping and brokering (re)produce migrant subjects and the borders of the state. My analysis focuses on more “legitimate” recruiters because of an interest in disclosing power relationships in the legal, everyday business of recruitment. It reveals that even as some recruiters provide significant assistance and care, their actions and motivations can also produce and intensify precarity for migrant workers vis-à-vis their employers and the state. At the heart of this dissertation is an argument about configurations of state power—specifically, about forms and spatializations of sovereign power. My analysis examines the position of recruiters within the labour migration cycle and how their interactions with the state enable their legitimation as mobile bordering agents. I posit that recruiters are “petty sovereigns,” who make largely unsupervised and discretionary decisions that impact migrant access to the transnational labour market and the Canadian nation-state. These decisions play out in a transnational sphere, at the front-end of the migration process, and in spaces beyond Canadian jurisdiction. In a market-driven context, the devolution and outsourcing of migrant selection and admission from the state to employers, and employers to contracted third-party recruiters, effectively contributes to the contracting out of accountability. While they are integral to the regulation of labour markets and cross-border flows, recruiters remain largely invisible in many accounts of migration, and one objective of this dissertation is to write these agential actors into larger discourses on neoliberal governance and migration management.

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This dissertation examines the sexualities of Filipino/as in Canada who live and work on the traditional and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Skxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver). Specifically, it sketches out how gender and sexual paradigms in the Philippines are brought to Canada through labour migration and are re-scripted in relation to racial, gender and sexual regimes in Canada. I examine how these negotiations take shape at three particular sites and community-organized spaces. The first site in which I attend to the making of sexualities is at Filipino basketball leagues and games organized in the local community. The second site is at community-organized beauty and religious pageants. And finally, I consider how sexualities are being articulated and worked with by self-identifying Filipino/a queer, lesbian, gay and transgender organizers and activists. I work with interviews and observations I collected at each of these community-organized spaces. To analyze how sexualities are negotiated at these sites, I use a queer diaspora, queer of colour and transnational framework that attempts to be mindful of Indigenous critiques that urge for scholarship to take into account the ongoing processes of colonialism in settler colonial nations like Canada. The dissertation suggests that sexualities taking shape at basketball games, beauty pageants and in Filipino/a queer spaces are influenced by dominant racial, gender and sexual paradigms formed in the Philippines' colonial encounters at the same time as they are negotiated in relation to normative white heteropatriarchal settler colonial logics in Canada. More broadly I argue that the racialized, classed and gendered sexualities of Filipino/as are being made and remade in the overlapping colonial and capitalist geographies of Canada's and the Philippines' distinct nation-building projects. I suggest that engaging with these geographies poses critical questions of place and politics for Filipina/os in Canada by offering ways of understanding nation that might wear away at the normalizing logics.

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Foreign-Born Soldiers and the Ambivalent Spaces of Citizenship examines the interlocking politics of immigration and citizenship, labor and militarism, and race and gender. I explore two cases of militarized citizenship: Filipino recruits in the U.S. military and Nepalese Gurkha soldiers in the British Army. The bulk of the thesis engages the lives of Filipino migrants who enlist in the U.S. military as a collective pathway to American citizenship for themselves and their families. Filipino nationals comprise the highest percentage of foreign-born military recruits, a trend enabled by the fact that U.S. citizenship is not required to serve in the armed forces and promoted by the colonial history of the U.S. in the Philippines. Filipinos are the only foreign-born nationals permitted to enlist in the U.S. Armed Forces without having to immigrate to the United States. Filipinos, in other words, are the exception to the permanent residency requirement necessary to join the U.S. military. Citizenship is, however, granted posthumously to any “alien” or “non-citizen national” whose death occurs on active duty, providing a legal “death dividend” for surviving relatives. I observe how the working lives of these migrants illuminate the new mobility of global (militarized) labor, a form of economic discipline facilitated by the state in the era of flexible accumulation. Over a period of twelve months, I conducted a series of in-depth interviews with Filipino military families in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the cases under study, the families of U.S. military personnel killed in action refused – in political protest – the offer of posthumous citizenship. These testimonies illuminate and juxtapose mundane and spectacular instances of state violence against agents of the state and their next of kin in a way that reveals conflicts inherent to incorporation and resistance internal to enlistment.

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This thesis examines the struggles and conditions of Baoris and Chharas, two adivasi(indigenous) communities living in Ahmedabad, India. It engages with the histories through which these communities were transformed into criminalized populations under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. As mapped Criminal Tribes, Baoris and Chharas were brought into a repressive policy apparatus designed to discipline and regulate, control and reform subaltern adivasi populations. This work documents the effects of this history in the post-colonial present. I assess Baoris and Chharas’ differentiated inclusion and exclusion within the long and troubled trajectory of India’s governmental power. Their struggles are situated within the dramatic recalibration of governmental logics and urban restructuring within the liberalizing metropolis. I consider the negotiation of rights and entitlements in a time and place wherein the Indian state is jettisoning its constitutional responsibilities to provide social welfare and democratic justice. This work argues that liberalization produces the informal to push the poor beyond the pale of legality, and suspend the possibility of accessing the technologies and categories of formal governance. I examine how the un-mapping of responsibilities, rights, and visibilities represents a central mechanism driving an emergent urban developmentalism that is reordering the city’s moral, legal and physical landscapes. Just as Baoris and Chharas’ experiences figure the greater erosion of rights and entitlements, their organizing also demonstrates how the developmental and rights-protecting apparatus of the Indian state remains a critical site of oppositional politics. I document their attempts to access and exercise technologies of governing in order to position themselves as legible populations within the classifications and categories of state power.

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