Agnes Malinowska

Biography

I received my Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 2018, and I’ve been working as a preceptor at MAPH since 2014. Before that, I earned a B.A. in philosophy and history from the University of California, Berkeley. My research and teaching interests these days center on the many ways that organic life, technology, and other kinds of nonhuman matter shape and influence human social forms and relations of power. On the one hand, I’m interested in the natural / “natural” life of the human body; I teach, research, and think about social formations and sites of struggle and domination around both biological reproduction and sexuality—especially for women and for those people historically-marked as sexually “deviant” in one way or another. On the other hand, I’m interested in unimaginably vast and unthinkably tiny natural processes and types of matter—particularly evolution and micro-matter (bacteria, viruses, pollen, and the like). I am especially interested in how these have been taken up in the social sciences and by cultural producers, alike; and in the way they have been intercepted by the state, by public health policy or other biopolitical institutions that regulate and control human and nonhuman populations.

Most broadly, my interests, research, and teaching live in gender and sexuality studies, queer and feminist theory, animal / nonhuman studies and the environmental humanities, science and technology studies, and the history of the social and biological sciences. I also always want to read and learn more about science fiction, historical and evolutionary origin stories, radical politics, so-called proletarian literature, and the 1930s “red decade.” I am primarily an Americanist literary and cultural studies scholar, and my thinking most often centers on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, though I’m moving further into the present all the time.

I am a proud member of Faculty Forward/SEIU Local 73, the contingent faculty union at the University of Chicago.

Recent Courses

ENGL 27704/47714 Reproductive citizens: gender, work, and the body

In this class, we focus on literature, film, history, and theory that deal with biological and social reproduction, motherhood and the politics of the home and family, and domestic and sexual labor. Our readings and viewings are centered in the U.S. and span the early twentieth century through the present—and we approach the above themes and structures in relation to the troubled and uneven histories of race, gender, and class that shape them. To this end, we will learn about the history of eugenics and sterilization; the afterlife of slavery and racist (anti-Asian) U.S. immigration policy; settler colonialism and the Native American reservation system; state policing of family and kinship structures; developments in reproductive and gender-affirming biotechnology; and the thorny politics of sex work. At the same time, we will be equally interested in the ways that activists, theorists, and other cultural producers have pushed against oppressive policies and structures to imagine and fight for reproductive justice and liberation at the intersection of race, labor, and gender. We spend time, for example, with Black and Native feminists, Marxist social reproduction theorists, family abolitionists, and sex worker’s rights activists. Readings and viewings may include: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Tillie Olsen, Gayl Jones, Fae Myenne Ng, Louise Erdrich, Lizzie Borden, Barbara Loden, Amy Heckerling, and the International Wages for Housework Campaign.

Prerequisites

Open enrollment for all graduate students, as well as 3rd- and 4th-year undergraduate students with majors in the Humanities and Social Sciences. All others, please email amalinowska@uchicago.edu to request permission to enroll.

Agnes Malinowska

2024-2025 Spring

Theory

20th/21st

ENGL 27716/47716 In a Queer Time and Place

Crosslistings

GNSE 23179; GNSE 40450

In this class, we orient ourselves around the so-called “temporal turn” in queer and trans studies, which has produced some of the most exciting and influential queer theory of the last twenty years. We investigate queer theory’s boldest interventions into the political and ideological workings of temporality alongside important works of queer and trans literature and film spanning the 1990s to the present. Our texts collectively interrogate the assumed naturalness of straight time and its governing logics; they question the ways that heteronormative imperatives around things like maturity, generation, marriage, and progress dictate what counts as a good life, a future worth having, or a history worth remembering. Together we chart queer modes of engagement with history, the archive, the temporality of gender and sex performance, the pace and rhythm of human development, the times and spaces of sex and intimacy, and the past/present/future divide. This class offers students a graduate-level introduction to queer theory and a good starting point for academic inquiry into c20-21 queer and trans literature and cinema. Theorists include Berlant, Cvetkovich, Edelman, Freccero, Halberstam, Keeling, Love, Muñoz, Freeman, Snorton, and others; fiction and film by Jean Carlomusto, Sadie Benning, Samuel Delany, Cheryl Dunye, Isaac Julien, Justin Torres, Virginia Woolf, and others.

Instructor consent only. Open to graduate students and 3rd-/4th-year undergraduates with majors in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.

Agnes Malinowska

2024-2025 Winter

Fiction

Theory

20th/21st