Professor Lee's talk, "Standard Man of a Nuclear Family," examines how Cold War radiation dosimetry constructed the "Standard Man"—a white, heteronormative fictional body—through the imperial archive of hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) suffering, revealing how mainstream science depended on racialized violence and non-normative lives. She traces this scientific history alongside poet April Naoko Heck's A Nuclear Family, which explores the bomb's lasting effects through matrilineal memory and both literal and metaphorical "digestions" of nuclear violence—from irradiated food to the ideological construct of the normative "nuclear family." Together, these frameworks expose radiation dosimetry as a racialized technology that defines the normative Human through the marginalization of those bodies it claims to protect.
Q&A and discussion will follow; lunch will be served.
About the Speaker
Sang Eun Eunice Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies and the Asian American Studies Program at Indiana University Bloomington. Her current research project, Digesting the Empire: Embodying Life beyond Militarized Circulations across the Pacific Ocean, brings together Asian diasporic literatures and literatures in the Pacific to explore physical and metaphorical digestions of militarized circulations of imperial matter. Her work has appeared in the journal Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS), the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and Situations, among others and in an edited volume, Locating Taiwan Cinema in the Twenty-First Century.
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Yasmin Jiesoo Yoon
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