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Challenges conventional notions of racial identity in an era of advanced genetic testing
Delving into the complex interplay of race, kinship, and technology, Technologies of Kinship challenges conventional notions of racial identity in an era of advanced genetic testing. As LiLi Johnson argues, kinship, far from being solely defined by biological ties, is a social construct shaped by "technologies of kinship"—systems like government bureaucracy, immigration policies, photography, online profiles, and ancestry tests. These technologies reveal the surprisingly fluid nature of racial categories in relation to kinship, a social formation that significantly affects how race is defined, understood, and experienced.
Johnson reexamines the technological systems that have shaped Asian American identity and kinship, exploring how the racialization of Asian Americans has evolved from exclusion to neoliberal multiculturalism over the last century, analyzing the political and interpersonal implications of these social and cultural changes for affected families.. If kinship is the product of the prevailing racial and gendered ideologies within our culture, then its technologies also determine and shape the terms of social intimacy and belonging.
Through a dexterous interdisciplinary lens, Technologies of Kinship traces historical, cultural, and digital images and texts, reflecting on and reimagining how technological systems have shaped the co-constitution of race and kinship in American culture. This book invites readers to reimagine the boundaries of family and identity in a technologically driven world.
"Johnson’s work draws a startingly original link between 20th-century visual and bio technologies and the ways we imagine our relationship to others. Situating family as a site of gender and racial formation through technological forms–photography, bureaucracy, IVF, and gene sequencing–she makes a compelling case for the importance of Asian American Studies and feminist STS. If kinship is, in part, an affective projection, she suggests, racialization enables intimacy as well as ideas about who belongs together. Technologies of Kinship is both a heartening and chilling exploration of the historical ways in which science and technology come to inform human desires."