Resisting the Museum: Archiving Trans* Presence and Queer Futures with Chris E. Vargas Sarita Hernández (bio) The Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art reimagines the confines of an institution and delves into the historical archive carving out stories of gender transgressions and performative interventions.1 Chris E. Vargas, the founder and artist behind MOTHA, activates the archive by listening for what exists within the silence and erasure of our queer and trans artist of color histories. In our conversation,2 we shared our experiences engaging different archives and collections, some in libraries and cultural institutions, others under our beds and in our closets. Many of us are not documented in the archive due to systemic oppressions, but I’m entranced by how agency can exist in holding our own archives and conjuring alternative modes of hirstorical (self-)preservation beyond an institution. Excavating hirstories, herstories, queerstories, theirstories, MOTHA seeks to carve out these histories existing within the margins and deconstructs the notion that only one history exists. Not simply interested in visibility, but in a reimagination of queer pasts, presents, and futures, we flirt with truth and facts while honoring the precarious nature of history. Imaginary and “forever under construction,”3 MOTHA continues pushing the boundaries of hegemonic narratives and advocates for the liminal spaces that appear, disappear, and reappear all at once. With the recent inclusion of select representations of trans experiences in mass media and LGBT history, MOTHA questions what stories are being told, who is telling them, and where they end up. This questioning is vital to memory trespasses, archival transgressions, and hirstorical transactions between and outside the binary. The artivation of the archive (artchive) defies historical linear, static, and binary frameworks by inspiring alternative interpretations and reimagining what is documented or not, how it got there or got lost, why it’s there or isn’t, and how to break open the hirstorical artchive. [End Page 371] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. “Pronoun Showdown,” Created by Chris E. Vargas. [End Page 372] Hernández: You had a residency in New York recently? How’s that going? Vargas: Yeah, I was just in New York for four weeks. I’m currently an artist-in-residence at the New Museum,4 where I’m organizing an exhibition that opens in September 2018. The show is part of my larger conceptual museum project: the Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art, or MOTHA. For the New Museum, I’m making an installation engaging with the complex and layered history of the Stonewall riots. We are approaching the fiftieth anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots, and there will be a lot of events looking back to honor and commemorate this history. As aspects of our LGBT past get disseminated in various ways, it’s a history that’s getting more widely known, but there’s still so much that’s unknown about the actual events. In fact, since day one there have been conflicting stories as to what and how it all went down that night at the bar. There’s also been a continual revisiting and recuperating of different aspects and details of the events, including different ways that people are re-inserting themselves into the history who have otherwise been overlooked in the narrative, especially queer and trans people of color. Whenever we look back at history, it is biased and self-serving; it’s usually to narrate a particular politic and vision of our present. For example, when marriage-rights activism was at its highest intensity, people would draw a direct line from Stonewall to gay marriage that erased all the radical politics, extreme social and economic marginalization, and so many of the issues that were at stake for people involved in the Stonewall riots, especially for people of color and people who were lacking resources, like housing, employment, health care. That’s why I think it’s interesting because Stonewall is this site that people point to with all these different stories around it. For the gallery, we are re-creating Christopher Park, which is the park just out front of the actual bar. Currently there are two pairs of sculptures there, two men...

The history of negating black childhood and the history of rendering the full potential of black citizenship an unbegotten promise are paired together through violent notions of time. Examining black childhood in two eras, this article argues that childhood is deadly under antiblackness because of its ambivalent and discrepant stickiness to black bodies, and its positioning of blackness within differing relations to futurity and temporality. The first section critically unpacks infantilizing discourses within colonial law, abolitionist discourse, and gradual emancipation during the antebellum era. The second undertakes an interrogation of the discursive constructions of Trayvon Martin’s adolescence during the so-called postracial era. Across these eras, the constructions of black childhood and adolescence as being out of time, as defined by prolonged dependency and elongated becoming, allow the violences of antiblackness to continue amid dubious claims to progress: the alleged success of Northern abolition, and the emergence of a postracial society. Pairing the temporal negations of black childhood in these two eras, it offers the framing of adolescent citizenship. Adolescent citizenship is the produced relation between some citizens and the nation whereby the adolescent citizen’s demands for recognition are dismissed under the guise of the citizen’s, and the demand’s, inappropriate timing.

At Home on the Range:Cowboy Culture, Indians, and the Assimilation of Enemy Children in the Cold War Borderlands Jonna Perrillo (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Scientist Ernst Seiler with sons Klaus and Bernd at their barracks on the boys' first day in El Paso, 1948. Courtesy of Bernd Seiler. One winter afternoon in 1946, Alicia Swann, an elementary school principal in El Paso, received an unusual phone call. Lois Godfrey, the American military liaison for the families of Nazi scientists relocated to nearby Fort Bliss, called Swann to ask if Crockett Elementary might accept some of the ninety school-aged children who would arrive in El Paso that spring. A year earlier, in one of the first acts of the Cold War, the US Army had launched Operation Paperclip, recruiting 118 scientists and technicians who designed the V-2 missile for the Third Reich to build an American missile program. The scientists' wives and children were now beginning to arrive, and Swann was faced with a difficult decision. Could she "consent to let German children—enemy children—come through the door?" She decided that she [End Page 945] could. Within months of the children's arrival, Swann found her instincts had been right. By her measure, the Paperclip children fit in easily, learned English quickly, and possessed "no class barriers" from the school's other students. At Crockett and in their intensive English-language classes at Fort Bliss, the children learned to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and sing "The Eyes of Texas." When asked how she reconciled the fact that the children's fathers had worked for Adolf Hitler, Swann responded, "I cannot concern myself with whatever [the parents] are or have been. It is with the children that I rest my hopes. … In spirit and in thinking they are American, for they have a happiness here they have never known before." Crockett's embrace of the German children, she argued, was simply American. To exemplify the students' easy assimilation, Swann pointed to the example of Peter Lange. In class, another student had referred to him as "our German boy." Lange corrected him, explaining that he was no longer German but just another "Davy Crockett." To Swann, Lange's story illustrated that the Paperclip students were like any American children, in their values and their imaginations.1 Still, the transformation was not predestined. Instead, Lange's choice to figure himself in the mold of the frontiersman, Texan migrant, and Alamo martyr for whom his school was named underscores the purposeful role that schools like Swann's played in upholding western heroes as models of patriotism. Swann's story points to what this essay is about: the ways in which romanticized narratives of the western frontier served to socialize "enemy" children in American Cold War values at the same time they aligned the children with Anglo America. Examining the importance of frontier myths in assimilating children born in Nazi Germany reminds us that such narratives can be geographically specific and transnationally relevant at once. In this case, western myths spoke to deep structural analogues in German and American histories, even as individual events and the space of time over which they took place differed.2 Reflecting on his social studies education, former Paperclip child Henry Tschinkel concluded that the history he studied in Germany during the war was, in its cultural and nationalist goals, much like "what Crockett taught me about Texas history. … The Alamo, David Crockett the good hero, Santa Ana the bad Mexican guy, the heroic separation of Texas from Mexico."3 Tschinkel and other Paperclip children experienced these stories as both individual history lessons and a broader means of teaching citizenship shared by two nations that, at different times, aggressively sought to create a new geopolitical order. Yet the use of Mexico as a trope in social studies instruction (not unlike the role of the Indian, to promote the heroism of Anglos like Crockett) reflects borderland [End Page 946] educators' specific, often regionally inflected choices in teaching narratives of nation formation. Secondarily, then, this story compels us to consider how teachers and schools participated in creating, not just disseminating, nationalist ideology...

Countering Right-Wing Populism:Transgressive Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity Movements in Europe Kim Rygiel (bio) and Feyzi Baban (bio) Over the past several years, right-wing populist movements have emerged and strengthened across Europe and North America. Yet, at the same time, in response to growing xenophobia and racism, political mobilizations by refugees and migrants, as well as citizens working in solidarity with them, have also emerged, demanding human and labor rights, fair asylum processes, and mobility rights. We examine the emergence of grassroots solidarity initiatives in cities and towns such as Berlin, Copenhagen, Riace, Istanbul, and Gaziantep, which include arts and museum projects, kitchen hubs, and flat-sharing that foster pluralism and open community to newcomers. This essay examines these as transnational forms of solidarity, informed by notions of "transgressive cosmopolitanisms."1 It investigates these alternative sites as disruptive of hierarchical borders of belonging between newcomers (recently arrived migrants and refugees) and locals (nonmigrant residents), which thereby foster more inclusionary ways of living together. In the European context (e.g., Denmark, Germany, Italy, and Turkey), these movements are significant because they challenge the rigidity of thinking about national identities and belonging, coupled with restrictive immigration and refugee policies, both of which make it difficult for newcomers to establish themselves as members of the larger society. These movements provide much-needed social and cultural spaces where newcomers can establish networks with nonmigrant residents. The radical impact of these movements stems, first, from their resistance to the idea of homogeneous national identities, championed by right-wing movements but also prevalent in mainstream understandings about what it means to be German, Danish, Italian, or Turkish; and second, their ability to provide spaces and activities through which newcomers and locals can create new understandings of belonging. [End Page 1069] Countering Right-Wing Populism through Solidarity across Borders The "long summer of migration" to Europe in 20152—which included the arrival of over 3.5 million Syrians in Turkey and almost 1 million asylum seekers in Germany, many of whom were Syrian—has spurred two opposing movements. The first is the rise of right-wing populism fueling xenophobia and racism across Europe, and the second, the emergence of transnational solidarity movements with refugees and migrants that demand greater social justice and freedom of movement. In the first case, right-wing populist parties and movements across Europe have contributed to racism, antimigrant and refugee discourse, and xenophobia more broadly. The March 2018 Italian election saw the populist Five Star Movement win 32 percent of the vote, while the hard-right, antimigrant, Eurosceptic Northern League won another 18 percent.3 This election follows the ascendance of other far-right parties and movements, including France's Front National, Hungary's Fidesz Party, Austria's Freedom Party, and in Germany, the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and PEGIDA (the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West). Confronted with shocking images of thousands of refugees and migrants marching through the Balkan countries of Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia in 2015, Hungary erected a barbed wire fence along its southern border with Serbia. The rise of antirefugee/antimigrant right-wing populism is not limited to Europe, however, as far-right groups are creating linkages between transnational white supremacy4 and "radical Europeanism."5 Ironically, however, despite making transnational linkages, such networks call for maintaining borders, whether national, racial, cultural, or religious. This ideology has led to violent attacks against others perceived to be different for reasons of race, religion, or sexuality, as seen, for example, in the nearly daily attacks on refugee shelters in response to German chancellor Angela Merkel's welcoming of refugees into Germany in 2015.6 Such movements can, therefore, no longer be dismissed as simply local or as existing on the margins of society; rather, this is a phenomenon we must contend with as activists, academics, and progressive citizens committed to fostering open and pluralistic communities. The second counter, cross-border movement is a strengthening of political mobilization by refugees and migrants, as well as citizens organizing in solidarity, demanding human rights and social justice, whether labor rights, housing, health care, and freedom of mobility, including the right to asylum.7 As part of...

Thinking Black [Trans] Gender Cameron Awkward-Rich (bio) Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. By C. Riley Snorton. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. 272 pages. $100.00 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History. By Kadji Amin. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 272 pages. $94.95 (cloth). $25.95 (paper). Ezili's Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders. By Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 264 pages. $99.95 (cloth). $25.95 (paper). Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility. Edited by Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. 448 pages. $49.94 (hardcover). To put it mildly, the 2010s have been a disorienting decade of and for trans-gender in the United States. Anyone will tell you so. The usual story goes like this: whereas, once, trans people and our concerns were nearly invisible, now the country has found itself on the other side of a "transgender tipping point," as announced by a 2014 Time cover story,1 which has led to an influx of trans representation in popular media; preoccupation with trans students' bathroom habits; recurrent squabbles in the philosophical blogosphere; better account keeping on the US transgender dead; on and on. In short, the last five years or so have been marked by a profound increase in trans visibility. Importantly, this is not the first time national conversation has fixated on people and practices we might call trans; as Treva Ellison implores us to remember, "Public interest in and discourse around gender and sexuality [is] iterative and connected to conflicts or crises in economic, social, and political capital."2 Still, given our mass-mediated world, this particular iteration of trans visibility has brought about an unprecedented number of television programs, feature-length films, chattered-about legal proceedings, and magazine covers [End Page 903] featuring, if not always exactly trans people, trans as a set of ideas about sex/gender/autonomy with which the country must, again, reckon. However, as should be clear from my lists of what visibility has wrought, this proliferation of discourse has not been all for the better. While our public reckoning has, in some places, sped along positive changes in the lives of some trans people, the 2010s have also been marked by an erosion of the conditions of livability for many others, a state of affairs that has only sharpened since the 2016 election. Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility—a timely and visually stunning anthology edited by Tourmaline, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton—addresses itself to precisely this paradox. Assembling an array of scholars, artists, and activists, Trap Door offers a varied set of essays and conversations on the promise, limit, and potentiality of visual culture for trans living and politics. Because the anthology as a whole and its individual components strive to "allow the paradox of trans representation in the current moment to find form in conversations that don't attempt to smooth the contradictions" (xxiii), the book resolves little and, instead, opens up avenues for thought. There are many excellent pieces in Trap Door, including Morgan M. Page's reflection on her work as a public historian and the "eerie parallels" between past and present moments of trans visibility (142); Abram J. Lewis's dossier of documents from 1970s trans activism, which employed tactics both familiar (building community support services, critiquing the carceral state) and extraterrestrial (turning to the paranormal and otherworldly as resources for "expand[ing] human potential otherwise limited by social constraint) (64–65); and Sara Ahmed's essay—reprinted from the "Trans/Feminisms" issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly—on the rhetoric of anti-trans feminisms that have resurged in the shadow of the tipping point. However, there is one avenue to which the anthology, as a collective voice, returns again and again, one that seems to be a source of particularly productive "trouble" (183): the terrain where blackness and transness meet. In the usual story, the paradox of trans visibility is narrated as a generalized structuring condition of contemporary trans life—and, I think, it is. However, it...

Anti-Muslim Racism beyond Islamophobia Keith P. Feldman (bio) Islamophobia and Racism in America. By Erik Love. New York: New York University Press, 2017. 272 pp. $89.00 (cloth). $28.00 (paper). The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race. By Neda Maghbouleh. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. 248 pp. $85.00 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip-Hop in the United States. By Su'ad Abdul Khabeer. New York: New York University Press, 2016. 288 pp. $89.00 (cloth). $30.00 (paper). The 9/11 Generation: Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror. By Sunaina Marr Maira. New York: New York University Press, 2016. 320 pp. $89.00 (cloth). $28.00 (paper). With Stones in Our Hands: Writings on Muslims, Racism, and Empire. Edited by Sohail Daulatzai and Junaid Rana. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 416 pp. $104.00 (cloth). $25.95 (paper). In June 2018 the US Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of Donald Trump's Presidential Proclamation No. 9645, "Enhancing Vetting Capabilities and Processes for Detecting Attempted Entry into the United States by Terrorists or Other Public-Safety Threats."1 Trump's own vitriolic anti-Muslim statements about a policy colloquially known as the Muslim Ban had been a major part of his candidacy, and advocates and critics alike framed the proclamation as keeping Trump's campaign promise of either a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the country," or at least "extreme vetting" of prospective visa recipients.2 After numerous legal challenges and significant public pressure, including massive protests at US airports when the first iteration of the order went into effect, the policy brought before the Court placed heavy entry restrictions on nationals from Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, and North Korea. [End Page 1141] The Court rests its decision in Trump v. Hawaii on the "authority of the Presidency itself" (29). Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts argues that the proclamation is predicated on national security concerns, and such matters fall squarely under the purview of executive power. While acknowledging that "this President's words strike at fundamental standards of respect and tradition" (29), Roberts finds such discursive bluster constitutionally immaterial. Since the proclamation is "facially neutral" toward religion (29), it neither contravenes the Constitution's protection of religious freedom nor runs afoul of the Immigration and Nationality Act's antidiscrimination clauses. In her blistering dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor disagrees with Roberts's assessment, focusing on how, from its inception, the proclamation carried a "discriminatory taint" premised on President Trump's "apparent hostility towards the Islamic faith" (12). Based on a litany of Trump's statements as candidate and then as president, Sotomayor argues that "a reasonable observer would conclude that the Proclamation was driven primarily by anti-Muslim animus" (1). The Court's decision "fails to safeguard" the First Amendment "promise of religious liberty" (1). Trump v. Hawaii's majority and dissenting opinions are diametrically opposed in their final views. Anti-Muslim speech acts are either inconsequential when it comes to what appears as a facially neutral policy, or they are the reflection of an unconstitutional form of religious discrimination. Yet both opinions share one crucial, if unspoken, assumption: the proclamation is racially color-blind. Debates about race and racism are almost wholly invisible in the majority opinion, the dissent, or indeed the dozens of amicus curiae briefs filed in the case. Almost, that is, except for one small thread: the specter summoned by Justice Sotomayor of the 1944 Supreme Court ruling in Korematsu that upheld Executive Order 9066 authorizing the mass internment of US citizens of Japanese descent. Both Sotomayor and Roberts recognize Korematsu as predicated on a "gravely injurious racial classification" (26). Sotomayor seizes on the "dangerous logic" (28) that echoes the racial discrimination of the past in the religious discrimination of today. Roberts swiftly suggests that Korematsu "has been overruled in the court of history" (38) even as he asserts its irrelevance for adjudicating a "facially neutral policy denying certain foreign nationals the privilege of admission" (38). The opinions in Trump v. Hawaii exemplify a juridically narrow sense of the concept of race. What might...

This essay locates the origin of biopolitics on the Caribbean plantation and elaborates a theory of zombie biopolitics—a phrase used to describe the living death of slavery and to revise, as well, Michel Foucault's dichotomy between sovereign power (which lets live and makes die) and biopower (which makes live and lets die). Zombie biopower, in contrast, makes live as dead. With attention to geography, capitalism, and race as aspects of biopower that need foregrounding in the Plantationocene, the essay moves from the scene of the living dead on the plantation of Barbados in the seventeenth century to an account of the zombie's origins in colonial St. Domingue, and turns in closing to the relation between the Caribbean origins of the zombie and Hollywood zombie culture.

Knowing Why Revolution Must Come:Digital Humanities as Poetry and Prayer Jacqueline Wernimont (bio) In Joy Harjo's "Eagle Poem" she observes that "to pray you open your whole self" to the world. This is an act not only of openness but also of humility: you "know that there is more / that you can't see, can't hear."1 Calling in the presence of a "more" that is beyond visual or aural proof, Harjo draws our attention to ways of being and sensorial engagements that exceed dominant Anglo knowledge paradigms. Her "more" points to the many modes of communication, the "cloud-language, cricket-singing talk, and the melodic whir of hummingbirds" that are so often overwritten by the "violent colonization process" of the English language and Anglo ways of knowing.2 Harjo also points to the ways of being, the bodies, spirits, and energies that are "more" than the binary Cartesian models of subject and personhood brought to the Americas during European colonization. To accept, to know as Harjo does, that there is more is to eschew the dominance spuriously offered by white supremacy, patriarchy, and imperialism. Such openness may well feel like a voluntary exposure, a risk, or even a loss, especially for people who reside comfortably within dominant systems. For those who are marginalized, knowledge of the "more" is a condition of being; people inhabit traditional knowledge systems while also knowing that they are perpetually exposed to surveillance capitalism and settler logics. How might scholarship, research, and teaching be different if it more closely resembled Harjo's model of prayer? In many ways this is a strange question for me to ask as a secular/agnostic person. I do not have a devotional or prayerful practice in any real sense. Additionally, raised in a white enlightenment paradigm that values the "hard" sciences and empirical aural and visual evidence, I feel myself resisting the lexicon of faith. At the same time, I have been listening to people of color inside and outside academe, and I hear words like fellowship, care, kinship, and prayer. I also hear the language of desire and love weave across twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminist work. Centering all of this, I wonder how love, desire, care, and prayer [End Page 671] might transform the futures we create, how they are already transforming the presents we currently inhabit. In addition to exposure and risk, we can understand such an opening of the self as an act of love and trust. An enactment of the belief that there is in fact more than what dominates, more than what has been delivered to us by a violent history and the ongoing violence of the present. A practice of love for others and for otherness: love for the possible futures that are not the ones imagined in heteronormative, white supremacist, capitalist, and patriarchal paradigms. A trust in and love for the visions of those who have not been afforded security in current sociopolitical formations. Despite my skepticism of the language of prayer, I find myself trusting that there is indeed more and, increasingly, demanding that we open our scholarly scope to include more. To me, this developing trust feels increasingly essential to survival. It also feels kin to visions of poetry and poetics that have long been a part of my work. Adrianne Rich in the Arts of the Possible observes that poetry is "liberatory at its core." While poetry for Rich is not revolution itself, it is "a way of knowing" why revolution "must come."3 It is built from "supreme efforts of care" and made from "words that create rather than attenuate community."4 Working in different contexts but drawing on a shared feminist tradition, Bethany Nowviskie has also invoked "care," explicitly calling for a feminist ethic of care in humanistic and cultural heritage work. As she notes, an ethics of care "means to reorient its practitioners' understanding in two essential ways. The first is toward a humanistic appreciation of context, interdependence, and vulnerability—of fragile, earthly things and their interrelation. The second is away from the supposedly objective evaluation and judgment of the philosophical mainstream of ethics—that is, away from criticism—and toward...

DASH-Amerikan:Keeping Up with the Social Media Ecologies of the Kardashians Jordan Buysse (bio), Alicia Caticha (bio), Alyssa Collins (bio), Justin Greenlee (bio), Sarah McEleney (bio), and Joseph Thompson (bio) DASH-Amerikan: Keeping Up with the Social Media Ecologies of the Kardashians http://dashamerikan.scholarslab.org In 2015 the season premiere of Keeping Up with the Kardashians (KUWTK) was the most viewed Sunday cable program, outperforming the series finale of the critically acclaimed television drama Mad Men. While Kim Kardashian and company have never received the adulation that Don Draper elicited, the family's sheer popularity and infamy demands further inspection by scholars who claim interest in the cultural productions that reflect and shape our historical moment. As consumers of reality television and digital human-ists alike, we ask: what does it really take to keep up with the Kardashians? In response, the six members of the 2016–17 Praxis Program, an interdisciplinary cohort of graduate students in the Scholars' Lab at the University of Virginia, used digital humanities tools and methodologies to survey the media ecologies surrounding the Kardashians and discuss their impact on twenty-first-century notions of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. By simulating the appearance of the Kardashians' online fashion boutique, DASH-Amerikan pushes past established understandings of the family to unpack the sometimes-competing constructions of femininity, ethnicity, and cultural power found within their media ecologies. The Kardashian family, whose public figures include Kim, Kourtney, Khloé, and Kris in addition to Caitlyn, Kendall, and Kylie Jenner, is most often maligned as famous for being famous. Dominant industry opinions echo that of Barbara Walters, who, in a 2011 interview with the family, stated flatly, "You don't have any, forgive me, talent."1 The Kardashian origin story is defined by Kim's celebrity sex tape made with then boyfriend and hip-hop artist Ray J, which was leaked in 2007. In its libidinal aftermath, Kim's influence was often [End Page 609] reduced to her curvaceous body type on display in photos like those from Paper magazine, which allegedly "broke the internet" in 2014. These images feature Kim's nude body, a bottle of champagne, and visual emphasis on her famously large posterior. Partly because of this kind of highly sexualized self-promotion, critics have viewed the Kardashians as either the harbingers of society's moral decay or, relatedly, a symptom of narcissism in modern society. Against such facile and dominant judgments, the DASH-Amerikan project examines the Kardashian family's impact on contemporary American culture. If we forget what we think we know about the Kardashians, what other themes are revealed? The project began in 2016 by running web-scraping scripts to amass public data from the family's Twitter feeds, closed captioning from eleven seasons of KUWTK, tabloid articles from Us Weekly, and metadata from the fanfiction site Wattpad.2 The Praxis cohort then used topic modeling to identify clusters within the data and compose a digital essay devoted to the emerging themes of motherhood, ancestry, and adoption. In sifting through the available evidence, we found that the social media ecology of the Kardashians does, in fact, foreground the desirability of female family members to spur financial gain. The content of the family's Twitter feeds, combined with the dialog from KUWTK and its surrounding tabloid coverage, share a performance of femininity that is uniquely aware of—and caters to—male heteronormative desires. Topic modeling clusters within the family's Twitter feeds confirmed this initial understanding of the platform as a promotional outlet for KUWTK. However, it also revealed a more empowered reading of the Kardashians regarding such themes as motherhood and women's biological selves, which the Kardashians addressed in surprisingly candid and realistic terms. Within discussions of motherhood published on Twitter and aired on KUWTK, we found an emphasis on the path from marriage to pregnancy, with such discussions containing reflections on the female body's reproductive power as well as troubles with fertility and the difficulties of childbirth. Data from Us Weekly's tabloid coverage of the Kardashian women also featured a close surveillance of their physical form, specifically the monitoring of weight fluctuations and the recovery of prepregnancy...