"Violent Inheritance deepens the analysis of settler colonialism's endurance in the North American West and how infrastructures that ground sexual modernity are both reproduced and challenged by publics who have inherited them. E Cram redefines sexual modernity through extractivism, wherein sexuality functions to extract value from life including land, air, minerals, and bodies. Analyzing struggles over memory cultures through the region's land use controversies at the turn of and well into the twentieth century, Cram unpacks the consequences of western settlement and the energy regimes that fueled it. Transfusing queer eco-criticism with archival and ethnographic research, Cram reconstructs the linkages—""land lines""—between infrastructure, violence, sexuality, and energy and shows how racialized sexual knowledges cultivated settler colonial cultures of both innervation and enervation. From the residential school system to elite health seekers desiring the ""electric"" climates of the Rocky Mountains to the war-time incarceration of Japanese Americans, Cram demonstrates how the environment promised to some individuals access to vital energy and to others the exhaustion of populations through state violence and racial capitalism. Grappling with these land lines, Cram insists, helps interrogate regimes of value and build otherwise unrealized connections between queer studies and the environmental and energy humanities. "
By:
E Cram
Imprint: University of California Press
Country of Publication: United States
Volume: 3
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 20mm
Weight: 408g
ISBN: 9780520379473
ISBN 10: 0520379470
Series: Environmental Communication, Power, and Culture
Pages: 292
Publication Date: 24 May 2022
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Contents List of Figures Preface: Rooted Kinship Acknowledgments Introduction: Land Lines of Violent Inheritance 1. Cartographies of Sexual Modernity 2. Settler Intimacies and the Social Life of the Archive 3. Childhood and Settler Aesthetics of Violence 4. Affected Persons, Sexual Transits, and Contested Public Memories 5. Petroculture and Intimate Atmospheres Conclusion: Infrastructures of Feeling and Queer Collaborative Stewardship Notes Bibliography Index
E Cram is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa and associate editor of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Queer Studies and Communication.
Reviews for Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West
"""This inclusion of energy in telling the story of sexual modernity and the framework of land lines will be of value to scholars in queer studies, energy and environmental humanities, and studies of the North American West."" * Western American Literature * ""Overall, Violent Inheritance is a compelling case that is methodologically rich and draws from interdisciplinary works to theorize sexual modernity as a sector of biopower and biopolitics."" * International Journal of Communication *"
