Lee, Rachel C.
Education
B.A., 1988, Cornell University
Ph.D., 1995, University of California, Los Angeles
Interests
Multidisciplinary humanities professor at UCLA Rachel C. Lee is the author of The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality and Posthuman Ecologies (2014), and editor of The Routledge Companion to Asian and Pacific Islander Literature (2014). Her current research focuses on frameworks that deepen relationality between individuals with “environmental illness” (including chronic Lyme, MCS, heavy-metal intoxication, and the like) and scholarship in an anti-racist and anti-colonial vein. She is part of the research collective “How We Make It: Imagining Medical Justice After Covid’s Long Haul” sponsored by the UC Humanities Research Institute; and is Co-PI on the University of California’s multicampus research program initiative, Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice. To download recent and past articles, see https://chavez-ucla.academia.edu/RachelLee. To hear Rachel being interviewed by Radio New Zealand’s Susana Lei’ataua on fragrance-free spaces, see https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/eastermonday/audio/2018885513/the-growing-call-for-fragrance-free-spaces
Links to Recent Articles
A Lattice of Chemicalized Kinship
Metabolic Aesthetics: On the Feminist Scentscapes of Anicka Yi
Selected Works
Editor, Special Issue on “Life (Un)Ltd: Feminism, Bioscience, Race.” The Scholar and the Feminist (Fall 2013).
“Parasexual Generativity and Chimeracological Entanglements in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome,” The Scholar and the Feminist (Fall 2013).
“Haptics, Mobile Handhelds, and other ‘Novel’ Devices: The Tactile Unconscious of Reading across Old and New Media.” CTheory (Jan. 2012).
“‘Where’s My Parade?’ Margaret Cho and the Asian American Body in Space.” TDR: The Drama Review 48.2 (Summer 2004): 108-132. (PDF)
“Notes from the (non)Field: Theorizing and Teaching ‘Women of Color.’” Meridians 1.1 (Fall 2000): 85-109. Rpt. In Women’s Studies on Its Own, ed. Robyn Wiegman, Duke University Press, 2002. 82-105.
“Asian Americans’ Performing Blackface, Blacks’ Performing Yellowface: Costly Performances or Coalitional Enactments.” Literature on the Move: Comparing Diasporic Ethnicities in Europe and the Americas. Eds. Dominique Marcais, Mark Niemeyer, Bernard Vincent, Cathy Waegner. Heidelberg: Universitaetsverlag C., 2002. 147 – 158.
“Asian American Cultural Production in Asian-Pacific Perspective.” boundary 2 26.2 (summer 1999): 231-254.
Recent Classes Taught
Undergraduate:
Los Angeles: Layers and Landscapes
Tactility (senior seminar)
Gross Anatomy: Representing Through Body Parts
War, Patriotism, and Asian American Cultural Acts of Good Citizenship
Specialized Studies in 20th Century American Literature: Theaters of Race
Feminist Theory
Graduate:
The Body Eclectic: Special Topics in Asian American Critical Theory
Racial Feeling, Post-racial Biopolitics Visceral, Voluble, and Virtual: Femiqueer Corporealities
Feminist Knowledge Production: Biopolitics and the Woman-Sex Question
Interest Areas
• Ecocriticism / Environmental Humanities / Biopolitics
• Asian American Literature & Culture
• Sexuality & Gender Studies
