This dossier, edited by Tavia Nyong’o and Kyla Wazana Tompkins, considers the ongoing attack on higher education in general, and on women’s, gender, and sexuality studies in particular, in relation to the Epstein class and university funding models. With contributions from Emily Owens and Jennifer C. Nash, Grace Kyungwon Hong, Greta LaFleur, Gillian Harkins, and Rinaldo Walcott, the dossier rejects the notion that Jeffrey Epstein was an aberration and that universities were merely his mark. Alongside investigating questions about the university and its complicity and about what work our current vocabulary for Epstein does culturally, the dossier insists that other relations to knowledge remain possible.
We had planned this introduction as a dialogue, on the model of the exchange we published in Capacious Journal in September 2018. Re-reading that exchange with these essays now in hand, we find ourselves still circling civility and what one … Continue reading “The Epstein Class and the University: An Introduction”
We were both students at Harvard, in different capacities, the year that Larry Summers, the (our) then-university president, asserted that women might lack the innate aptitude for science. We became feminist friends through women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, a small … Continue reading “The Epstein Class at Harvard”
In 2007, University of California, Los Angeles adjunct professor emeritus of neurology Mark Tramo, then at Harvard University, sent an assistant of Jeffrey Epstein a message of support after having “read the newspapers,” writing, “please remind him that boys from … Continue reading “Sexual Violence and the Production of Knowledge”
We find ourselves in a moment of retrenchment, a time for the shedding of the silly fictions of what was previously referred to as “political correctness” (now also dismissed as “woke,” or “DEI,” or “affirmative action”), a time for sighs … Continue reading “University Capture and the Epstein Era”
This essay asks what it means to call people like Jeffrey Epstein “pedophiles.” The term pedophile was mobilized across the 1990s-2010s to name an exceptional sexual predator everyone could condemn, directing opposition to childhood sexual abuse toward punitive rather than … Continue reading “On the Vileness of the Pedophile”
The Caribbean has a reputation. Slavery haunts the Jeffrey Epstein saga. The British planter Thomas Thistlewood wrote in his diaries of his time as an overseer and owner of slaves in Jamaica details of the many slave women he sexually … Continue reading “Slavery’s Ghostly Libido: Epstein and the Islands”
