Janice Feng

Janice Feng is a 2022 WW Women's Studies Fellow and a Fellow at the Institute of Humanities at the University of Michigan for the tenure of 2022-2023. I have also been a short-term fellow at the D'Arcy McNickle Center for Amercian Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library. My work has also been supported by the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the International Institute, Rackham Graduate School, and the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan, where I have also completed a certificate in Women's and Gender's Studies. I hold a MA in Political Science and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought from the University of Victoria, and a BA in Political Science and Philosophy from the University of Alberta. 

My dissertation, entitled “The Cultivation of Desire and Indigenous Women’s Self-Making and Resistance in French North America, 1633-1763,” I examine the cultivation of desire—affective and embodied attachment—and management of bodies in early modern French imperial imaginary and settler colonial rule in Nouvelle-France (present day Québec and the Great Lakes area). Bringing together literary texts and political treatises, missionary reports and letters, and Indigenous material culture practices and oral history, I develop an alternative theoretical framework to examine empire and modern colonialism. Critically analyzing imperial ideologies and settler colonial techniques of power, and reconstructing Indigenous women’s agency, resistance, and experiences, I show that the cultivation of desire was central to early modern European imperial gender ideology, concrete settler colonial techniques of power, and Indigenous women’s self-making and resistance. Putting these diverse sources and practices together, I explore how Indigenous women drew from various resources, such as cultivating land and literary practices, to cultivate their desire socially and politically, in order to exercise agency and enact resistance. 

My work has appeared in the History of European Ideas, Theory & Event, and is forthcoming in Revue internationale de philosophie (2022). 

Fields of Study:

• Political Theory 
• Feminist and Queer Theory 
• Settler-Colonial and Indigenous Studies