Naming Stakes: Critical Histories of Classification and Categorization

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Questions of taxonomy and ontology—what makes a thing a thing, which things cluster together, how to define a thing’s boundaries—have long interested scholars in the history of science and STS. This panel brings together new methods for approaching these questions, and foregrounds postcolonial, feminist, disability, and queer and trans approaches that highlight both the hegemonic “points of view” enshrined in classification systems and the fragility of those systems. Each of the papers looks at the messy, on the ground work of how categories get made, and the mechanics of their enforcement and enactment. They examine practices of classification in realms of administrative technology; mental health and obstetrics; embryology and eugenics; and statistical studies of sex. Together, these talks offer concrete examples for understanding how classificatory regimes make bodies and individuals governable, legible, and practicable. They emphasize that classification systems are always a means to an end: each talk considers not only what entities are created, but also how they are used in broader social and political contexts and which interests are served by different kinds of sorting. Collectively, these talks place histories of classification in dialogue with critical studies of race, gender, colonialism, and health, and open up possibilities to extend conversations beyond the existing literature.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Miriam Rich, Dartmouth College

Individual Presentations

• Individuating the Classified Self - Zehra Hashmi, Brown University

• Classifying Maternal Mental Illness: Race and Diagnostic Categories in the Early Twentieth Century - Udodiri Okwandu, Harvard University

• Monstrous Taxonomies: Teratology and Classification in the Nineteenth Century - Miriam Rich, Dartmouth College

• ‘A 2-Way Breakdown’: Statistical Methods and Sex Categories in the Kinsey Studies - Beans Velocci, University of Pennsylvania

Session Organizer

• Beans Velocci, University of Pennsylvania