Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West

Violent Inheritance explores how infrastructures that support sexual modernity are reproduced and challenged by publics who have inherited them, redefining sexual modernity through extractivism and analyzing struggles over memory cultures through land use controversies. It reconstructs the linkages between infrastructure, violence, sexuality, and energy, demonstrating how racialized sexual knowledges cultivated settler colonial cultures of innervation and enervation.

Format: Hardback
Length: 292 pages
Publication date: 24 May 2022
Publisher: University of California Press

Violent Inheritance delves into the enduring legacy of settler colonialism in the North American West, exploring how infrastructures that shape sexual modernity are reproduced and contested by those who have inherited them. E Cram reimagines sexual modernity through extractivism, where sexuality serves as a means to extract value from various aspects of life, including land, air, minerals, and bodies. By examining land use controversies in the region at the turn of the century and into the early 20th century, Cram uncovers the consequences of Western settlement and the energy regimes that fueled it. Through a fusion of queer eco-criticism, archival and ethnographic research, Cram reconstructs the interconnectedness between infrastructure, violence, sexuality, and energy, revealing how racialized sexual knowledge cultivated settler colonial cultures of both innervation and enervation.

From the residential school system to elite health seekers seeking the electric climates of the Rocky Mountains to the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans, Cram demonstrates how the environment promised access to vital energy for some individuals while simultaneously exhausting populations through state violence and racial capitalism. By engaging with these land lines, Cram argues that it is crucial to interrogate value regimes and forge previously unrealized connections between queer studies and the environmental and energy humanities.

Weight: 544g
Dimension: 229 x 152 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780520379466