Camisha Russell, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, will be giving a CAS IR Talk “Race and Choice in the Era of Liberal Eugenics” on Monday, 2 March 2020, 3:30–5:00pm in the Knight Library Browsing Room.

Camisha joined the Department of Philosophy in 2017. She is currently Co-Editor of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. Her primary research and teaching interests are in Critical Philosophy of Race, Feminist Philosophy, and Bioethics. The Assisted Reproduction of Race is her first book. Other recent publications include “Rights-holders or refugees? Do gay men need reproductive justice” in Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online (2018) and “Eugenics” in The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race (2017).

Talk abstract: What role does race play in assisted reproduction in a reproductive era of what we might call liberal eugenics? In this talk, I argue that this question can be addressed in terms of what Foucault called technologies of the self. By considering some examples of how identity features, including race, are used by people and couples in sperm donor selection, I show how these decisions (and their privatization) serve political (and indeed depoliticizing) purposes. Moreover, I suggest that pressure for racial matching in assisted reproduction serves not only to renaturalize notions of race, but to defend the new liberal eugenics by denying any racialized agenda.