od’s intervention was also considered a factor in clinical outcomes. after a spate of negative pregnancy results, Linda reflected on why things were going so badly. she recalled an embryo transfer that I had observed a few weeks before. When dr. Padilla pulled the catheter out from the patient’s uterus, it had been covered with blood. (Clinicians maneuver carefully to avoid this kind of bleed-ing, but sometimes they cannot.) My stomach sank when I saw dr. Padilla and Linda exchange a look. Linda later explained: “blood is invasive and damaging for embryos. In that case, it’s the only explanation we have [for why the patient didn’t get pregnant], because we did nothing different. Nothing! God is not giving me a hand. Lately he has forgotten me. When we transfer the embryos, and I see that [they] are good quality and could achieve pregnancy, and nevertheless they do not, it is because, unexpectedly, God did not want it.”

When the Gay International incites discourse on homosexuality in the non-Western world, it claims that the “liberation” of those it defends lies in the bal-ance. In espousing this liberation project, the Gay International is destroyingsocial and sexual configurations of desire in the interest of reproducing a worldin its own image, one wherein its sexual categories and desires are safe frombeing questioned. Because it has solicited and received some support from Araband Muslim native informants who are mostly located in the United States andwho accept its sexual categories and identities, the Gay International’s imperialistepistemological task is proceeding apace with little opposition from the majorityof the sexual beings it wants to “liberate” and whose social and sexual worlds it isdestroying in the process. In undertaking this universalizing project, the GayInternational ultimately makes itself feel better about a world it forces to share itsidentifications. Its missionary achievement, however, will be the creation not of aqueer planet but rather a straightone.

A cartoon on a 2007 cover of the major New York literary magazine the New Yorkercaptures this dilemma wonderfully. Three young women sit side by side in a New York subway car. One is in full black niqab with just her eyes showing. Next to her sits a blond who is wear-ing large sunglasses, shorts, a bikini top, and fl ip- fl ops revealing painted toenails. Next to her sits a kindly looking, bespectacled nun wearing a habit. The caption reads: “Girls will be girls.

While ethnographic scholarship has offered nuancedand intimate portraits of the politics of working-classwhite people populating the Rust Belt and“flyoverstates”that Trump won (see, for example, Dudley 2002;Walley 2013), an ethnographic encounter with these sub-jects focused particularly on contradictions can produc-tively draw from the broad anthropological traditionof contextualizing inconsistencies and paradoxes. In thisspirit, I conducted additional semistructured interviewswith six Trump supporters, most of whom hail from“fly-over states.”While this additional data does not obvi-ate my point above about the importance of deep eth-nographic research, it supplements my discussion withCandace by further exposing how the contradictions en-demic to all liberal democratic subjects take shape in thepolitical era of Trump. My respondents live in the DeepSouth, the Southwest, the Midwest, New England, andmy home town of New York City, but I don’tclaimthatthis is a“representative sample size”of Trump support-ers. To the contrary, in exploring a range of Trump sup-porters’perspectives I aim to challenge the suggestionthat any subset of voters can stand metonymically for a“type”of political subjectivity. Following Harding (1991),my intention here is to disabuse myself and others ofthe notion of a coherent and categoricalrepugnant other,while destabilizing the political margins that such an other443REVISITING“THE REPUGNANT OTHER”IN THE ERA OFTRUMP

To reach the kinds of growth the stock market expects purely through the development of new therapeutics requires three to five new chemical entities to be approved each year. This is difficult to achieve. If only one in five drug candidates entering clinical trials makes it to market, then in order to gener-ate three to five new chemical entities a year, the company needs a large pipe-line of drugs entering clinical trials. The absence of a robust pipeline in the pharmaceutical industry exacerbates the crisis. The pharmaceutical industry has over the past two decades faced what is referred to as an innovation defi-cit, a concern that developed in the latter half of the 1990s.8 This was likely a function of the fact that by this time many of the low-hanging fruit, natural products that could be developed as potential therapeutic molecules, had al-ready been picked, and more sophisticated, targeted forms of drug discovery that could address mechanistic aspects of disease were seen as necessary. The structural relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and the specu-lative marketplace thus intensified a scientific crisis that had already been in existence

Th e leading causes of maternal death have been identifi ed as hemor-rhage, pulmonary embolism, pregnancy- induced hypertension (leading to preeclampsia and eclampsia), puerperal infection, and ectopic preg-nancy. Th at these conditions aff ect Black women with a disproportion-ate frequency and are more fatal has been attributed to the higher rates among Black women of high blood pressure, preexisting and gesta-tional diabetes, and obesity. Indeed, one study reported that 54 percent of women who died from pregnancy- related causes had a history of chronic disease— among them hypertension, cardiac disease, diabetes, schleroderma, and sickle cell. Obesity was the most commonly identifi ed condition (Campbell 2007). Th ese are all conditions, in addition to de-creased health care access (due to poverty), which aff ect Black women at disproportionate rates. Such information has led some researchers to con-clude that to bring white and Black maternal mortality rates to parity, we ought to “eliminate socioeconomic disadvantage” by increasing Black women’s access to early prenatal care, then monitoring them more closely for hypertension and diabetes while attempting to control the eff ects of obesity. Th is increasingly pop u lar view explains racial health disparities as wholly a function of class and preexisting medical conditions while saying nothing about the individuals under whose care Black women are dispro-portionately dying.

)is comparison is by no means symmetrical. )e fact that the everyday e*cacy of traditional Chinese medicine is construed to be something out of the ordinary already assumes the normalized e*cacy and the underlying scientistic “rationality” to which biomedicine readily lays claim. Yet even as the production of “clinical miracles” reinscribes the marginality and Oth-erness of traditional Chinese medicine, it opens up a contingent ground for negotiating -uid modes of constructing knowledges and authorities, and for participating in the production of science. At a time when Western medicine squarely grounds its authority in science even though its ties to biological sciences are historically recent and highly fraught (Starr #$%.), “clinical miracles” as an ambiguous yet powerful source for medical knowl-edge and authority beg critical rethinking of what counts—and for whom it counts—as legitimate scienti(c practice. In other words, at stake in the production of “clinical miracles” is more than the legitimacy of an Other medicine, for our understandings and practices of science also turn out to be a contingent (eld for creative, interested play

"My madrinha was a real mother to me. Dona Gra�as raised me with care and great sacrifice. In those days food was scarce, and some days all we had to eat was the coarsest manioc flour, farinha de ro�a. I found it hard to swallow because of a.sickness that injured my throat when I was a small baby. It made my godmother sad to see me getting skinny, so she begged a few spoonfuls of the finest whitest f arinha every day from her patroa so that she could make me a smooth custard� When there was no other food, Madrinha would take an ear of hard Indian corn, and she would roast it and coax me into eating the dried kernels one by one. I was close to dying more than once, but my godmother fought with me to stay alive. And she won !

Researchers often include life histories in theirethnographic texts as a way of intimately connecting the reader to the lives of the informants.

approaches. Qualitative research in anthropology aims to comprehensively describe humanbehavior and the contexts in which it occurs while quantitative research seeks patterns in numericaldata that can explain aspects of human behavior. Quantitative patterns can be gleaned from statisticalanalyses, maps, charts, graphs, and textual descriptions. Surveys are a common quantitative techniquethat usually involves closed-ended questions in which respondents select their responses from a list ofpre-defined choices such as their degree of agreement or disagreement, multiple-choice answers, andrankings of items. While surveys usually lack the sort of contextual detail associated with qualitativeresearch, they tend to be relatively easy to code numerically and, as a result, can be easier to analyzethan qualitative data. Surveys are also useful for gathering specific data points within a large popula-tion, something that is challenging to do with many qualitative techniques.