Touching Like a State

This paper offers a theorization of how the state touches. Through an analysis of the extensive 2011 protests over Wisconsin Senate Bill 11, we interrogate the relatively non‐violent interactions between police and protesters during the 17‐day occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol building. On display there were diverse police deployments of “soft” force and haptic touching, technologies that enabled officers to subtly affect the movements and relations of protester crowds without resorting to familiar coercion‐ and consent‐based politics. We offer a pair of concepts, cathexis and l'esprit de l'escalier, to diagram how statist touches were mobilized to catch individuals unawares and momentarily co‐opt their bodily affects. These modes of control suggest much greater savvy regarding touch, force, and affect than is often granted in representations of the state apparatus. In light of this, we close with a reflection on the changing tactical grounds for struggle.     

“Protect Wisconsin Families”? Rethinking Left Family Values in the 2011 Wisconsin Uprising

This article seeks to rethink the trope of the “working family” so prevalent in contemporary politics, with particular attention to its promise and constitutive limits for the Left. It takes up contemporary socialist, feminist, anti‐racist and queer scholarship on the discourse of family, bringing it to bear on the case of “working family” rhetoric in the 2011 Wisconsin Uprising against austerity and public‐sector union‐busting. Reckoning with the term's racist and heteropatriachal valences, and its centrality in privatising social reproduction, I conclude by considering potential alternative horizons for thinking intimacy, labour, and social citizenship for the intersectional Left.     

The Myrick Park Mounds (47Lc10), an Effigy Mound Site in Western Wisconsin

The earliest documented excavation of an effigy mound group by a professional archaeologist occurred in 1883 when Frederic Ward Putnam and local acquaintances excavated portions of four mounds at the Myrick Park site (47Lc10) in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Putnam worked on one effigy (similar to the short-tailed turtle form) and three conical mounds. Theodore H. Lewis visited the site in 1885 and mapped one additional conical mound. We examined documentation and collections housed at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. Artifacts include a portion of a Madison Cord Impressed jar (a common Effigy Mound offering) and a trailed rim sherd similar to terminal Late Woodland types. Human remains represent a minimum of 23 individuals: 18 adults and 5 subadults. Dental and skeletal evidence indicates a relatively healthy population with low levels of nutritional deficiency, early life stress, and trauma, similar to other regional Late Woodland populations.     

Mud box—filled with stone: the wreck of the scow schooner Dan Hayes

Scow Schooners are an important yet largely unstudied vessel type that operated on the North American Great Lakes. At their zenith in the later 19th century scow schooners worked between the many small harbours and the larger nexus ports such as Chicago, Detroit, and Milwaukee. These vessels are virtually undocumented either historically or archaeologically. A project by East Carolina University's Maritime Studies Program and the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in 2001 documented the wrecked scow schooner Dan Hayes , revealing much information concerning this vessel class and the limestone industry in which it was employed. Although an ordinary scow schooner, its construction techniques are surprising, showing evidence of prefabrication. The bottom of the ship was apparently built inverted and flipped over before sides and bow were added, the first evidence that inverted construction could be accomplished with such large vessels.     

The Search for A,otonatendïe

Abstract

Equivocal clues in the Jesuit Relations and the few other historical documents relating to A,otonatendie, an important, but short-lived, mid-17th-century, inter-tribal, anti-Iroquois coalition beyond “the Great Lake of the Hurons,” are now supplemented by archaeological evidence at Rock Island at the mouth of Green Bay in Door County, Wisconsin, suggesting a positive resolution to uncertainty about its location.