Bonnie McElhinny

Biography

Bonnie McElhinny is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto.  Her SSHRC-funded research focuses on historical and contemporary investigations of North American interventions into Filipino health care and childcare practices, and reactions and resistance to these.  Her current work includes an investigation into early 20th century attempts to address high infant mortality rates in the Philippines during the American colonial occupation, as a case study in imperial attempts to restructure affect and intimacy, and the ways debates about children were used as a terrain for imperial and nationalist arguments.  She also investigates contemporary ramifications of these histories in research on Filipino-Canadians with the Kritical Kolectibo. McElhinny is the founding co-editor of the journal Gender and Language, and has recently written a number of theoretical papers on the role of language in an era of globalization, corporatization and neoliberalization.