Jennifer Terry

Picture of Jennifer Terry
Professor Emerita, Gender and Sexuality Studies
School of Humanities
Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz, 1992, History of Consciousness
M.L.I.S., UC Berkeley, 1984, Archival Preservation
B.A., UC Santa Cruz, 1980, Political Theory
Phone: (949) 824-2376
Fax: (949) 824-7006
Email: jterry@uci.edu
University of California, Irvine
3218 Humanities Gateway Building
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA 92697
Research Interests
cultural studies of medicine; science and technology studies; formations of sexuality; critical approaches to modernity; American studies in transnational perspective
Academic Distinctions
Visiting Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Columbia University, Spring 2014.

Seminar Fellow, Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, USC School of Cinema and Television, June 2006.

Co-Principal Investigator, Project on Privacy, Identity and Technology, National Science Foundation Human and Social Dynamics Division, 2005-2008, with J. Paul Dourish (Informatics) and Simon Cole (Criminology, Law, and Society); $750,000.

Primary Investigator, Technology, Markets and Globalization, Center for Research and Information Technology, UCI, 2004-05.

Research Fellow, Space, Race, and Sexuality, UC Humanities Research Institute, 2004.

Visiting Research Scholar, Center for the Study of Women, UCLA, 1999-2000.

Junior faculty seed grant, Ohio State University, 1996-97.

Coca-Cola Corporation Grant, Women's Studies, Ohio State University, 1996-97.

Resident Fellow, Humanities Institute, SUNY Stony Brook, 1992.

Post-Doctoral Fellow, Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, Brown University, 1991-92.
Appointments
Pembroke Center for Research on Women, Brown University (1991-1992)
Humanities Center, State University of New York at Stony Brook (1992)
Research Abstract
I joined the faculty at UC Irvine in January 2003, as a professor of Women’s Studies/Gender & Sexuality Studies with affiliations in Anthropology and Comparative Literature. My scholarship is concentrated in feminist cultural studies; science and technology studies; comparative and historical formations of gender, race, and sexuality; critical approaches to modernity; state-sponsored violence and biomedicine; and American studies in transnational perspective. I was a visiting professor at Columbia University for Spring 2014. I have previously taught at UC Berkeley and Ohio State University. I received my PhD in History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz.

My books include An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (University of Chicago Press, 1999), Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture (Indiana University Press, 1995), and Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life (Routledge, 1997). I have written articles and chapters on reproductive politics, the history of sexual science in the United States, contemporary scientific approaches to the sex lives of animals, love of objects, signature injuries of war, and the relationship between war-making practices and entertainment.

My latest book is Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First-Century America (Duke 2017). Modern modes of militarization and innovations in medicine are deeply entangled with one another and bound up in a relationship of mutual provocation. The book examines this entanglement and explores how ordinary people become deeply attached to war today in ways that are either rarely acknowledged and routinely disavowed or hyperbolically celebrated as painful yet redemptive truths. My focus, in the book, is on how state-sanctioned wounding provokes the expansion of medical knowledge to produce new techniques and technologies aimed at contending with and sometimes exploiting the damage done by war. This relationship of mutual provocation, I argue, perpetuates and elaborates processes of militarization by excusing war as a necessary condition for human advancement. I examine a series of cases, each centered around a particular source of biomedical war profiteering, to analyze how the entangled relationship between war making and medical knowledge is manifested in the context of speculative capitalism and U.S. empire.

In 2008, I completed a three-year National Science Foundation collaborative project on Privacy, Identity, and Technology, with Paul Dourish and Simon Cole. I chaired the department of Women's Studies at UC Irvine from 2005 through 2008. After we changed our name, I chaired the department of Gender & Sexuality Studies from 2010 through 2012 and again from 2017 through 2020. I was a member of the Critical Theory Institute at UC Irvine from 2005 through 2008. I am the founder and former coordinator of the Queer Studies Minor degree program at UCI. After being in the profession for many years, I retired and became Professor Emerita in July 2024. My papers are held at the Pembroke Center's Feminist Theory Archive at Brown University. You may view the catalogue here: https://www.riamco.org/render?eadid=US-RPB-ms.2024.015&view=title

Select Media Appearances

"Battlefield Views," accessible at http://uci.edu/features/2010/07/feature_terry_100720.php

"The YouTube Wars," The Riz Khan Show, al Jazeera English, aired June 16, 2010, accessible at http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/rizkhan/2010/06/20106157235198947.html

"Do Women Need a Sex Pill?", CNN Opinion Online, June 21, 2010, accessible at http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/06/21/terry.sex.pill.women/index.html?iref=allsearch

Courses Frequently Taught:

Undergraduate courses:
Gender and Feminism in Everyday Life
Gender and Popular Culture
Gender and Science
Gender and Technology
Feminist Theory
Queer Lives and Queer Knowledges
Feminist Cultural Studies
New Reproductive Technologies
Militarism and Gender
Queer History Making
Sexuality, Health and Medicine
Histories of Sexuality

Graduate courses:
Gender and Technoculture
Subaltern Sexualities
Feminist Knowledges and Social Change
Feminist Methodologies
Identity and Difference
Movement and Displacement
Feminism, Conflict, and Humanitarianism

UCI Affiliations:

Comparative Literature
Anthropology
UCI Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies

Other Affiliations

Consortium Member, Bioethics, Sexuality, and Gender Identity Project, Center for Bioethics, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine

Affiliate, Center for New Racial Studies Multi-campus Research Program based at UC Santa Barbara

Affiliate, Centre for Applied Somatechnics, Department of Critical and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, Australia
Publications
Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First-Century America (Duke University Press 2017)
"Killer Entertainments," Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Fall 2007), with Raegan Kelly, available for interactive viewing at http://www.vectorsjournal.org/index.php?page=7&projectId=86
"Loving Objects," Trans-humanities 2(1) (2010): 33-75.
"Significant Injury: War, Medicine, and Empire in Claudia's Case," Women's Studies Quarterly Special Issue on Technology, 37(1&2) (Spring/Summer 2009): 200-225.
An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society
Publisher: University of Chicago Press; (November 1999)
Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life
Routledge; 1 edition (May 1997)
Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture (Race, Gender, and Science)
Indiana University Press; (November 1995)
Grants
Privacy, Identity and Technology, National Science Foundation Human and Social Dynamics Division, 2005-2008, co-principal investigator with J. Paul Dourish and Simon Cole
Other Experience
Archivist
Emma Goldman Papers Project 1983—1985
Last updated
10/13/2024