Our first-year cohort member Roni Lakin presented his wonderful paper titled “With Steady Hands: Gilman and Bittencourt’s (Un)sentimental Feminist Eugenics” at the graduate conference Made to Measure hosted by the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers in early April.
Roni’s paper was presented under the panel for “Counting on Form: The Racial Vertigo of Quantity/Quality.” Drawing on Kyla Schuller’s concept of “biopolitics of feeling,” the paper examines how (un)sentimentalism operates in feminist utopian fictions by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Adalzira Bittencourt. It asks how both authors mobilize or subvert gendered and racialized hierarchies of feeling to articulate feminist futures grounded in eugenic thought. Roni argues that sentimentalism functions not merely as an aesthetic mode but as a regulatory mechanism that differentiates “civilized” from “primitive” bodies through cultivated emotional responsiveness.
Congratulations on Roni’s big progress in his research!