Dr. Jennifer Terry, UCI Gender and Sexuality Studies

Since January 2003, Jennifer Terry has been a professor of Women’s Studies/Gender & Sexuality Studies with affiliations in Anthropology and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Irvine. Her 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. She was a visiting professor at Columbia University for Spring 2014. She has previously taught at UC Berkeley and Ohio State University. She received my PhD in History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz.

Her 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). She has 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.

Her 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.