Heather Latimer

Assistant Professor

Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies

Currently on leave
Office: ART 254
Phone: 250.807.8153
Email: heather.latimer@ubc.ca

Research Summary

Feminist theories and epistemologies; sexuality studies; science and technology studies; cultural studies; literature and film; reproduction and pregnancy; reproductive technologies and politics; reproductive governance and abortion.

Courses & Teaching

Politics of Reproduction; Critical Sexuality Studies; Feminist Epistemologies; Gender and Popular Culture; Gender, Race, Sexuality and Power.

Websites

heatherlatimer.com

Degrees

PhD, English, Simon Fraser University
MA, Gender and Women's Studies, University of British Columbia

Research Interests & Projects

My current project, which is funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, examines the central role played by reproductive politics in contemporary dystopian fiction.

In the last few years a number of fictional texts have been published (primarily in North America and the UK) that portray a future, dystopic society fixated on reproductive control. Through a study of fourteen core texts, I am researching why this genre has become prominent now, hypothesizing that it identifies the political unconscious, to use Fredric Jameson’s term, of public and private discourses, and reveals how and why reproduction has become a cultural and political obsession.

Selected Publications & Presentations

Google Scholar

Book

Latimer, Heather. Reproductive Acts: Sexual Politics in North American Fiction and Film. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2013.

Articles and Book Chapters

Latimer, Heather. “Roe and our Dystopic Imagination,” from “Fifty Years since Roe v. Wade: Forum.” Feminist Studies, vol 48, no.3, 2022, pp. 824-849.

Latimer, Heather. ” Abortion Regulation as the Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Or, A Call to Make Abortion Natural Again.” Feminist Studies vol. 48, no.2, 2022, pp. 342-366

Latimer, Heather. “A Queer Pregnancy: Affective Kinship, Time Travel, and Reproductive Choice in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival.” Feminist Theory vol. 22, no. 4, 2021. No pagination yet.

Latimer, Heather. “All Politics are Reproductive: Abortion and Environment in Marianne Apostolides’ Deep Salt Water.” Forthcoming in Representing Abortion, edited by Rachel Hurst. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020, no pagination yet.

Latimer, Heather. “Snapping: Feminist Pedagogy and the ‘New’ Right.” Forthcoming in a special issue of Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice, 2020, no pagination yet.

Latimer, Heather. “Queering Cosmopolitan Futurity: Sailing into the Unknown in Emanuele Ciralese’s Terraferma.” Journal of Intercultural Studies vol. 40, no. 5, 2019, pp 534-546.

Latimer, Heather. “Reproductive Politics, the Negative Present, and Cosmopolitan Futurity.”  In Negative Cosmopolitanisms: Cultures and Politics of World Citizenship after Globalization, edited by Eddy Kent and Terri Tomsky. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2017, pp. 195-213.

Latimer, Heather. “Pregnant Possibilities: Cosmopolitanism, Kinship and Reproductive Futurism in Maria Full of Grace and In America.” In Whose Cosmopolitanism? Critical Cosmopolitanism, Relationalities and Discontents, edited by Andrew Irving and Nina Glick Schiller. London: Berghahn Press, 2014, pp. 227-243.

Latimer, Heather. “The Straight Line: Sexuality, Futurity, and the Politics of Austerity.” English Studies in Canada vol. 39, no.4, 2013, pp. 21-24.

Latimer, Heather. “Bio-reproductive Futurism: The Pregnant Refugee in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men.” Social Text vol. 29, no. 3 (108), 2011, pp. 51-72.

Latimer Heather. “Reproductive Technologies, Fetal Icons, and Genetic Freaks: Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and the Limits and Possibilities of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg.” Modern Fiction Studies vol. 57, no. 2, 2011, pp. 318-335.

Latimer, Heather. “Popular Culture and Reproductive Politics: Juno, Knocked Up and the Enduring Legacy of The Handmaid’s Tale.” Feminist Theory vol. 10, no. 2, 2009, pp. 209-224.

Selected Grants & Awards

2019-22, SSHRC Insight Development Grant
2017-19, UBC Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund Grant
2017, UBC Killam Teaching Prize
2015, Women’s and Gender Studies and Recherches Féministes Outstanding Scholarship Award (Book Prize)