As Judith Butler states in Undoing Gender, “When we ask what makes a life livable, we are asking about certain normative conditions that must be fulfilled for life to become life” (39). In a sense, radical “second wave” feminists of the 1960s and 1970s had taken up the question of what constitutes a livable life—in social space, in public institutions, in family formations—in order to produce analytics about the operations of power within social and cultural arrangements. This seminar will examine challenges to personhood at the end of the twentieth century through a genealogy of feminist thought. We will read work by Judith Butler, Lisa Cacho, Lisa Duggan, Sharon Holland, Karla Holloway, and fictional work by Jewelle Gomez and Alice Walker. We will explore the relationship between public and private space through considerations of bioethical claims to the body, the status of legal illegitimacy and social death, the private (and psychic) life of racism, and the role public policy plays in determining kinship.