Laura Briggs
Biographic Data
| ID | 3629430 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laura Briggs |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laura |
| FAMILY NAME | Briggs |
| SIGNATURE | BRIGGS L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Truckee Meadows Community College |
| ORCID | 0009-0000-8817-6745 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 161 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
What Do We Learn About Reproductive Justice If We Ask a Lesbian Feminist
This article stages a conversation between the questions of a reproductive justice movement with an earlier decade’s lesbian feminist politics. It narrates the experience of the lesbian feminists of the Coalition for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA) of the late 1970s and the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) of the 1980s to reflect on their politics, issues, and struggles, and what they can tell us about reproductiv…
Gender, Debt, and the Neo-Fascist Right: The Questions of Contemporary Reproductive Governance
There are three things roiling politics in these times: the rise of Right-wing, religiously inflected authoritarian nationalisms; the political economy of debt and austerity; and struggles over the politics of immigration, race, and gender (or "gender ideology"). This is not new, but it is arguably intensified in this moment, from Trumpism to Bolsonarismo to Orbanism. This paper analyses how this conjunction works through certain kinds of reprodu…
Models of classroom assessment for course-based research experiences
Course-based research pedagogy involves positioning students as contributors to authentic research projects as part of an engaging educational experience that promotes their learning and persistence in science. To develop a model for assessing and grading students engaged in this type of learning experience, the assessment aims and practices of a community of experienced course-based research instructors were collected and analyzed. This approach…
Author Conversation: Laura Briggs and Ethan Blue
Author conversation / mutual book reviews of Laura Briggs, Taking Children, and Ethan Blue, The Deportation Express
Intimate Integration: A History of the Sixties Scoop and the Colonization of Indigenous Kinship by Allyson D. Stevenson
Reviewed by: Intimate Integration: A History of the Sixties Scoop and the Colonization of Indigenous Kinship by Allyson D. Stevenson Laura Briggs (bio) Intimate Integration: A History of the Sixties Scoop and the Colonization of Indigenous Kinship by Allyson D. Stevenson University of Toronto Press, 2021 intimate integration is an ambitious book that sets out not just to tell us about Canada’s “Sixties Scoop” of Native children into foster care b…
Removals and Deportations
Latinidad, Dominicanidad, and Anti-Blackness: Two Nations under U.S. Empire
Lorgia García-Peña’s Borders of Dominicanidad situates the history of racial differentiation and exclusion in Hispaniola within the context of U.S. empire, arguing that the multiple occupations of the Dominican Republic by the U.S. Marines played a significant role in locating Blackness on the Haitian side of the border and latinidad—which was meant to exclude Blackness—on the Dominican side of the border. This article argues that we need to atte…
Afterward: Governing Reproduction
This afterward argues that the articles in this special issue show that while the desire to control fertility is as ubiquitous as sex in recorded human history, so too are efforts to govern it by states, religious institutions, and families. What distinguishes the modern era is thinking about fertility control in terms of populations—and hence, to a greater or lesser extent, state-organized eugenic schemes. In the most recent period, however, we …
Debates in the Field
Debt and imperialism have long been crucial questions for transnational feminism. This article attends particularly to recent and historical traditions of resistance in Puerto Rico and the wider Caribbean. It argues that part of the intellectual and political struggle has been to identify debt as an extractive enterprise and seize hold of a notion of freedom that is robust enough to resist what Jodi Kim and Michael Hudson have called "debt imperi…
How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump
Today all politics are reproductive politics, argues esteemed feminist critic Laura Briggs. From longer work hours to the election of Donald Trump, our current political crisis is above all about reproduction. Households are where we face our economic realities as social safety nets get cut and wages decline. Briggs brilliantly outlines how politicians’ racist accounts of reproduction—stories of Black “welfare queens” and Latina “breeding machine…
Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico
Original and compelling, Laura Briggs's Reproducing Empire shows how, for both Puerto Ricans and North Americans, ideologies of sexuality, reproduction, and gender have shaped relations between the island and the mainland. From science to public policy, the "culture of poverty" to overpopulation, feminism to Puerto Rican nationalism, this book uncovers the persistence of concerns about motherhood, prostitution, and family in shaping the beliefs a…
Pushing in Silence: Modernizing Puerto Rico and the Medicalization of Childbirth by Isabel M. Córdova
Pushing in Silence came out at a complicated time. With an estimated three thousand deaths from Hurricane María and a highly publicized fight about how to fund Medicaid in Puerto Rico, how do we read a book about how modernization drove women on the island to give birth in hospitals—except as tragedy? It’s possible that the answer is, in part, that it is more important than ever to restore a sense of the island as a complex place with a rich hist…
Central American Child Migration: Militarization and Tourism
Central American Child Migration:Militarization and Tourism Laura Briggs (bio) In 2014 about sixty-eight thousand children migrated from Central America to the United States unaccompanied by an adult, and that many again came with a parent, generally infants and toddlers with their mothers.1 They walked across the border, often after a grueling journey of being smuggled in cars, avoiding attention on buses, a few older ones on tops of trains—risk…
Transnational Feminisms Roundtable
Transnational Feminisms Roundtable Maylei Blackwell (bio), Laura Briggs (bio), and Mignonette Chiu (bio) The special issue editorial collective organized this roundtable as part of the Transnational Feminisms Summer Institute held at Ohio State University in July 2014. Given the abundant circulation of the term "transnational feminism" in current women's studies scholarship, dissertations, and job descriptions, the collective invited scholars to …
Imperialism as a Way of Life
This article reflects on the continued importance of feminist and queer activism and scholarship to understanding US imperialism, whether its subjects are taken to be war, securitization, and militarism; globalizing neoliberal capitalism; or ecological devastation. It explores the rape and sexualized torture of Arab/Muslim men in the war on terror, the targeting of women as the proper subjects of microfinance and other credit products, and women,…
Notes from Antigua Naval Base
Whither Feminism in Higher Education in the Current Crisis
WhitherFeminismin Higher Education in the CurrentCrisis? Laura Briggs I want to argue, against all common sense and a great deal of experience, that feminist scholars and administrators can have what they want and that the important question for how we conceptual ize the relationship of queer and sexuality studies to women's stud ies should not be one of resources. I say this having been chair of a department at the University of Arizona that sur…
Special Issue Introduction: The Politics of History and the History of Politics
Special Issue Introduction:The Politics of History and the History of Politics Laura Briggs and Karen Dubinsky This issue of American Indian Quarterly brings together a conversation that the participants-ably organized by Professor Margaret Jacobs-began a year ago at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. In this age of transnational studies, here is a fine example of a much-discussed but rarely achieved project: an interdisciplinary a…
Missing Mila, Finding Family: An International Adoption in the Shadow of the Salvadoran Civil War
With Missing Mila, Finding Family, Margaret Ward has given us a particularly affecting adoption narrative that exceeds the genre to become something else, a narrative about the disappearance of children during the civil war in El Salvador, including the involvement of the United States at the highest levels. It is also a profoundly particular, and hence human, story about how two families, one Salvadoran, one in the United States, work through th…
Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transnational and Transracial Adoption
In Somebody's Children, Laura Briggs examines the social and cultural forces—poverty, racism, economic inequality, and political violence—that have shaped transracial and transnational adoption in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. Focusing particularly on the experiences of those who have lost their children to adoption, Briggs analyzes the circumstances under which African…
Feminism and transnational adoption: Poverty, precarity, and the politics of raising (other people's?) children
Exploring school and home food environments: Perceptions of 8–10-year-olds and their parents in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Objective To use an innovative mixed-method approach to analyse and describe 8–10-year-olds’ home and school food environments. Design A mixed-method approach to collect qualitative and quantitative data was used, in which pupils took photographs over four days to record their food intake and food environment. The photographs were discussed in focus groups. A combination of lunchtime observations and questionnaires completed by parents were used …
Babies Without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas (review)
Reviewed by: Babies Without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas Laura Briggs Karen Dubinsky. Babies Without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas. New York: NYU Press, 2010; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. 204 pp. $21.95 sc. The two publishers of this excellent book on the politics of transnational and transracial adoption in the Americas—University of Toronto and New York University—gave it very differen…
Of Lesbians and Technosperm
Book Review| April 01 2009 OF LESBIANS AND TECHNOSPERM Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience Laura Mamo Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. xi + 304 pp. Laura Briggs Laura Briggs Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2009) 15 (2): 335–337. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2008-143 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Laura B…
Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis
This essay argues that transnationalism is an indispensible term, bringing into sharp relief all the ways that scholarly disciplines have relied upon, and reified, the nation. Although some have charged that the concept is intellectually "soft," this article contends that it does crucial work in undoing academic complicity with the ideological work of constructing the nation. Transnationalism is, we argue, a radical intervention with roots in ant…
Mother, Child, Race, Nation: The Visual Iconography of Rescue and the Politics of Transnational and Transracial Adoption
‘Third World’ poverty and hunger conjures up certain conventionalised images: thin children, with or without their mothers. This paper explores the genealogy of such images in the mid‐twentieth century, and shows how they mobilise ideologies of ‘rescue’ while pointing away from structural (political, military and economic) explanations for poverty, famine and other disasters. These images had a counterpart in practices of transnational and transr…
Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis
This essay argues that transnationalism is an indispensible term, bringing into sharp relief all the ways that scholarly disciplines have relied upon, and reified, the nation. Although some have charged that the concept is intellectually "soft," this article contends that it does crucial work in undoing academic complicity with the ideological work of constructing the nation. Transnationalism is, we argue, a radical intervention with roots in ant…
The Race of Hysteria: Overcivilization" and the "Savage" Woman in Late Nineteenth-Century Obstetrics and Gynecology
Hysteria, we learned from feminist historical scholarship in the 1970s, was never just a disease. It was also the way nineteenth-century U.S. and European cultures made sense of women's changing roles. Industrialization and urbanization wrought one set of changes, while the women's rights movement brought another. Together, these included higher education for women, their increasing participation in a (rapidly changing) public sphere, paid employ…
The Culture of Poverty, Crack Babies, and Welfare Cheats
Research Article| September 01 2003 The Culture of Poverty, Crack Babies, and Welfare Cheats: THE MAKING OF THE "HEALTHY WHITE BABY CRISIS" Ana Teresa Ortiz; Ana Teresa Ortiz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Laura Briggs Laura Briggs Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2003) 21 (3 (76)): 39–57. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-21-3_76-39 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter…
Feminism and transnational adoption: Poverty, precarity, and the politics of raising (other people's?) children
Discourses of "Forced Sterilization" in Puerto Rico: The Problem with the Speaking Subaltern
Research Article| July 01 1998 Discourses of "Forced Sterilization" in Puerto Rico: The Problem with the Speaking Subaltern Laura Briggs Laura Briggs laura briggs is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Arizona. She is currently working on a book entitled Reproducing Empire: Discourses of Gender, Health, and Reproduction in the U.S. Imperial Project in Puerto Rico. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google …
Debates in the Field
Debt and imperialism have long been crucial questions for transnational feminism. This article attends particularly to recent and historical traditions of resistance in Puerto Rico and the wider Caribbean. It argues that part of the intellectual and political struggle has been to identify debt as an extractive enterprise and seize hold of a notion of freedom that is robust enough to resist what Jodi Kim and Michael Hudson have called "debt imperi…
Activisms and Epistemologies
This article argues for a different academic practice in relation to social movements, asking scholars to be more deliberate about acknowledging the specifically intellectual contributions of activisms. It notes that much of the new theoretical work in the United States on neoliberalism neglects the strong critiques of neoliberalism emerging out of the Central American left in the late eighties and early nineties, as well as the Zapatista movemen…
Special Issue Introduction: The Politics of History and the History of Politics
Special Issue Introduction:The Politics of History and the History of Politics Laura Briggs and Karen Dubinsky This issue of American Indian Quarterly brings together a conversation that the participants-ably organized by Professor Margaret Jacobs-began a year ago at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. In this age of transnational studies, here is a fine example of a much-discussed but rarely achieved project: an interdisciplinary a…
Gender, Debt, and the Neo-Fascist Right: The Questions of Contemporary Reproductive Governance
There are three things roiling politics in these times: the rise of Right-wing, religiously inflected authoritarian nationalisms; the political economy of debt and austerity; and struggles over the politics of immigration, race, and gender (or "gender ideology"). This is not new, but it is arguably intensified in this moment, from Trumpism to Bolsonarismo to Orbanism. This paper analyses how this conjunction works through certain kinds of reprodu…
Transnational Feminisms Roundtable
Transnational Feminisms Roundtable Maylei Blackwell (bio), Laura Briggs (bio), and Mignonette Chiu (bio) The special issue editorial collective organized this roundtable as part of the Transnational Feminisms Summer Institute held at Ohio State University in July 2014. Given the abundant circulation of the term "transnational feminism" in current women's studies scholarship, dissertations, and job descriptions, the collective invited scholars to …
Discourses of "Forced Sterilization" in Puerto Rico: The Problem with the Speaking Subaltern
Research Article| July 01 1998 Discourses of "Forced Sterilization" in Puerto Rico: The Problem with the Speaking Subaltern Laura Briggs Laura Briggs laura briggs is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Arizona. She is currently working on a book entitled Reproducing Empire: Discourses of Gender, Health, and Reproduction in the U.S. Imperial Project in Puerto Rico. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google …
There is No Unauthorized Breeding in Jurassic Park: Gender and the Uses of Genetics
This article relies on close readings of Jurassic Park (the book and the film) and Gattaca (film) to argue that a great deal of the opposition to new genetic technologies expressed in contemporary popular culture is grounded in a profound anti-feminism. Both of these science fiction stories suggest that genetic manipulation is unnatural, and call for a return to a romanticized natural motherhood. In Jurassic Park, genetic science is figured as a …
The Race of Hysteria: Overcivilization" and the "Savage" Woman in Late Nineteenth-Century Obstetrics and Gynecology
Hysteria, we learned from feminist historical scholarship in the 1970s, was never just a disease. It was also the way nineteenth-century U.S. and European cultures made sense of women's changing roles. Industrialization and urbanization wrought one set of changes, while the women's rights movement brought another. Together, these included higher education for women, their increasing participation in a (rapidly changing) public sphere, paid employ…
Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars
Mother, Child, Race, Nation: The Visual Iconography of Rescue and the Politics of Transnational and Transracial Adoption
‘Third World’ poverty and hunger conjures up certain conventionalised images: thin children, with or without their mothers. This paper explores the genealogy of such images in the mid‐twentieth century, and shows how they mobilise ideologies of ‘rescue’ while pointing away from structural (political, military and economic) explanations for poverty, famine and other disasters. These images had a counterpart in practices of transnational and transr…
The Culture of Poverty, Crack Babies, and Welfare Cheats
Research Article| September 01 2003 The Culture of Poverty, Crack Babies, and Welfare Cheats: THE MAKING OF THE "HEALTHY WHITE BABY CRISIS" Ana Teresa Ortiz; Ana Teresa Ortiz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Laura Briggs Laura Briggs Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2003) 21 (3 (76)): 39–57. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-21-3_76-39 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter…
Of Morals, Sex, and Theory
Of Morals, Sex, and Theory Laura Briggs Last June, the New York Times, ran a blurb on the magazine cover for an article about “AIDS, Africa and Monogamy.” The article argues that in southern Africa, people who are unfaithful to their partners are likely to have ongoing, concurrent relationships that might contribute more to spreading HIV than one-night stands, which people in the U.S. tend to have when they are cheating. There’s no particular dat…
Making “American” Families: Transnational Adoption and U.S. Latin America Policy
Adopción transnacional: Robo De Criaturas, Familias Homoparentales Y Neoliberalismo
Adopción transnacional: robo de criaturas, familias homoparentales y neoliberalismo
Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis
This essay argues that transnationalism is an indispensible term, bringing into sharp relief all the ways that scholarly disciplines have relied upon, and reified, the nation. Although some have charged that the concept is intellectually "soft," this article contends that it does crucial work in undoing academic complicity with the ideological work of constructing the nation. Transnationalism is, we argue, a radical intervention with roots in ant…
Activisms and Epistemologies
This article argues for a different academic practice in relation to social movements, asking scholars to be more deliberate about acknowledging the specifically intellectual contributions of activisms. It notes that much of the new theoretical work in the United States on neoliberalism neglects the strong critiques of neoliberalism emerging out of the Central American left in the late eighties and early nineties, as well as the Zapatista movemen…
Of Lesbians and Technosperm
Book Review| April 01 2009 OF LESBIANS AND TECHNOSPERM Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience Laura Mamo Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. xi + 304 pp. Laura Briggs Laura Briggs Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2009) 15 (2): 335–337. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2008-143 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Laura B…
Exploring school and home food environments: Perceptions of 8–10-year-olds and their parents in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Objective To use an innovative mixed-method approach to analyse and describe 8–10-year-olds’ home and school food environments. Design A mixed-method approach to collect qualitative and quantitative data was used, in which pupils took photographs over four days to record their food intake and food environment. The photographs were discussed in focus groups. A combination of lunchtime observations and questionnaires completed by parents were used …
Babies Without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas (review)
Reviewed by: Babies Without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas Laura Briggs Karen Dubinsky. Babies Without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas. New York: NYU Press, 2010; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. 204 pp. $21.95 sc. The two publishers of this excellent book on the politics of transnational and transracial adoption in the Americas—University of Toronto and New York University—gave it very differen…
Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transnational and Transracial Adoption
In Somebody's Children, Laura Briggs examines the social and cultural forces—poverty, racism, economic inequality, and political violence—that have shaped transracial and transnational adoption in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. Focusing particularly on the experiences of those who have lost their children to adoption, Briggs analyzes the circumstances under which African…
Feminism and transnational adoption: Poverty, precarity, and the politics of raising (other people's?) children
Notes from Antigua Naval Base
Whither Feminism in Higher Education in the Current Crisis
WhitherFeminismin Higher Education in the CurrentCrisis? Laura Briggs I want to argue, against all common sense and a great deal of experience, that feminist scholars and administrators can have what they want and that the important question for how we conceptual ize the relationship of queer and sexuality studies to women's stud ies should not be one of resources. I say this having been chair of a department at the University of Arizona that sur…
Special Issue Introduction: The Politics of History and the History of Politics
Special Issue Introduction:The Politics of History and the History of Politics Laura Briggs and Karen Dubinsky This issue of American Indian Quarterly brings together a conversation that the participants-ably organized by Professor Margaret Jacobs-began a year ago at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. In this age of transnational studies, here is a fine example of a much-discussed but rarely achieved project: an interdisciplinary a…
Missing Mila, Finding Family: An International Adoption in the Shadow of the Salvadoran Civil War
With Missing Mila, Finding Family, Margaret Ward has given us a particularly affecting adoption narrative that exceeds the genre to become something else, a narrative about the disappearance of children during the civil war in El Salvador, including the involvement of the United States at the highest levels. It is also a profoundly particular, and hence human, story about how two families, one Salvadoran, one in the United States, work through th…
Transnational Feminisms Roundtable
Transnational Feminisms Roundtable Maylei Blackwell (bio), Laura Briggs (bio), and Mignonette Chiu (bio) The special issue editorial collective organized this roundtable as part of the Transnational Feminisms Summer Institute held at Ohio State University in July 2014. Given the abundant circulation of the term "transnational feminism" in current women's studies scholarship, dissertations, and job descriptions, the collective invited scholars to …
Imperialism as a Way of Life
This article reflects on the continued importance of feminist and queer activism and scholarship to understanding US imperialism, whether its subjects are taken to be war, securitization, and militarism; globalizing neoliberal capitalism; or ecological devastation. It explores the rape and sexualized torture of Arab/Muslim men in the war on terror, the targeting of women as the proper subjects of microfinance and other credit products, and women,…
Central American Child Migration: Militarization and Tourism
Central American Child Migration:Militarization and Tourism Laura Briggs (bio) In 2014 about sixty-eight thousand children migrated from Central America to the United States unaccompanied by an adult, and that many again came with a parent, generally infants and toddlers with their mothers.1 They walked across the border, often after a grueling journey of being smuggled in cars, avoiding attention on buses, a few older ones on tops of trains—risk…
Pushing in Silence: Modernizing Puerto Rico and the Medicalization of Childbirth by Isabel M. Córdova
Pushing in Silence came out at a complicated time. With an estimated three thousand deaths from Hurricane María and a highly publicized fight about how to fund Medicaid in Puerto Rico, how do we read a book about how modernization drove women on the island to give birth in hospitals—except as tragedy? It’s possible that the answer is, in part, that it is more important than ever to restore a sense of the island as a complex place with a rich hist…
How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump
Today all politics are reproductive politics, argues esteemed feminist critic Laura Briggs. From longer work hours to the election of Donald Trump, our current political crisis is above all about reproduction. Households are where we face our economic realities as social safety nets get cut and wages decline. Briggs brilliantly outlines how politicians’ racist accounts of reproduction—stories of Black “welfare queens” and Latina “breeding machine…
Political science (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Law (18 works) · History (14 works) · Politics (13 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Law (6 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Child Welfare and Adoption (5 works) · Computer Science (5 works)