Anne McClintock

Anne McClintock

Anne McClintock (born in Harare, Zimbabwe) is a writer, feminist scholar and public intellectual who has published widely on issues of sexuality, race, imperialism, and nationalism; popular and visual culture, photography, advertising and cultural theory. Transnational and interdisciplinary in character, her work explores the interrelations of gender, race, and class power within imperial modernity, spanning Victorian and contemporary Britain to contemporary South Africa, Ireland, and the United States. Since 2015, McClintock is the A. Barton Hepburn Professor in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and also affiliated with the Princeton Environmental Institute and the Department of English at Princeton University.^[1]

Previously, McClintock was the Simone de Beauvoir Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at UW–Madison where she taught from 1999 to 2015.^[2] Before UW-Madison, she taught at both Columbia University and New York University.

Biography

McClintock was born in Harare, Zimbabwe, moving to South Africa as a child, where she became involved in the anti-apartheid movement. She began her university studies at the University of Cape Town, completing a B.A. (Hons.) in English, before traveling to England, where she earned a M.Phil. in Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. She completed a Ph.D. in English Literature from Columbia University, where she subsequently became an Associate Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies, teaching in both the Department of English and the Institute of African Studies. She also held a Visiting Professorship at New York University before moving to the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she was the Simone de Beauvoir Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies.

McClintock is best known for her book, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. McClintock has also written short biographies of Olive Schreiner and Simone de Beauvoir and a monograph on madness, sexuality and colonialism called Double Crossings. She also co-edited (with Ella Shohat and Aamir Mufti) a collection called Dangerous Liaisons, as well as two special journal issues: one on sex work, and one on race and queer theory. McClintock has written over 50 articles and reviews, and has given over 160 keynote addresses and lectures in the US and abroad, on sexuality, race, gender, nationalism, imperialism, photography, visual culture, and contemporary culture in a wide range of prominent venues and journals, including Critical Inquiry, Transition, Social Text, New Formations, Feminist Review, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, The Village Voice, and The Women’s Review of Books, among others. Her articles and essays have been widely reprinted and anthologized both in the US and internationally.

McClintock is currently completing three books: a creative non-fiction book Skin Hunger: A Chronicle of Sex, Desire and Money (Jonathan Cape); Planet of Intimate Trespass: Essays on Sexuality and Power in a Global Era, (Routledge); and an anthology The Sex Work Reader (Vintage). She is also working on a new book called Paranoid Empire: Specters Beyond Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, (Duke University Press).

McClintock's writings have been widely acclaimed and anthologized. She has received numerous awards, including two prestigious MacArthur-SSRC Fellowships and numerous creative writing fellowships, including Artist Residency Fellowships at the MacDowell, Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, VCCA and Dorland writing colonies. Her work has been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Japanese, Taiwanese and Madarin.

McClintock has written many articles discussing her efforts to try and give prostitutes the most respectful and equal working conditions possible. McClintock writes an article discussing how the European Prostitute Congress is working to recognize prostitutes “for full rights as workers under European labor law” (McClintock, rights). These labor rights are intended to be put in place so prostitutes can trade their work for money safely, and be taxed normal taxes and live in a normal household without penalty. Another huge point that McClintock addresses in multiple articles is the forceful testing for HIV that prostitutes must go through. McClintock likes to point out that as she disagrees with the legalization of brothels, that they majority of men who attend there are married men, and having forceful HIV testing for those prostitutes would “protect good family men from infection” (McClintock, brothels). McClintock is trying to exploit the dangerous and underpaid working conditions for prostitutes and give them more rights than just having the final say of what type of sexual activity will occur in a session. McClintock states that the legalization of brothels (prostitution houses) is unacceptable and that if prostitution is going to be recognized as an occupation, then the working rights and payment need to be equal in comparison to an everyday job.

Citation: McClintock, Anne. “Women: Down by law - Reporting on Europe's first ever Prostitutes' Congress, Anne McClintock highlights their demands for equal working rights.” The Guardian, 21 Oct. 1991, libproxy.cortland.edu:2150/ps/i.do?p=STND&u=sunycort_main&id=GALE%7CA171153440&v=2.1&it=r&sid=ebsco.

McClintock, Anne. “Women: Meanwhile back at Chicken Ranch - Anne McClintock argues that it is unacceptable merely to legalise brothals.” Gale, The Guardian, 12 May 1992, libproxy.cortland.edu:2150/ps/i.do?p=STND&u=sunycort_main&id=GALE%7CA171014263&v=2.1&it=r&sid=ebsco.

Major works

Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest^[3]

Notes