Browsing by Author "Wiegman, Robyn"

My dissertation, Abolitionist Futures: Black Cultural Imagination at the End of the World, examines abolitionist imagination in the cultural production of black American writers, creatives, activists, and thinkers. From its inception in the nineteenth century, abolitionism has evolved from a social movement to abolish the institution of chattel slavery to a political tradition. Presently, abolition is as a critical method of understanding the genealogy of contemporary practices of racialized social management as an extension of racial subjugation that originated during the era of plantation slavery in the United States. Because the concept of abolition fundamentally grapples with the question of radical social transformation, it also raises a set of questions about the dual tension between hope and despair, optimism and pessimism, fugitivity and enclosure. At its core, abolition is about sustaining the capacity to imagine an otherwise, despite and in spite of violence, captivity, and coercion. With this in mind, this dissertation asks: what is the role of radical imagination in not only envisioning the destruction of existing social structures but in conjuring up and bringing forth abolitionist futures?

In the growing body of academic literature on the subject, abolition is most often considered from the perspective of political theory. In media, contemporary abolitionists are often portrayed as radical militants, who desire violence and destruction. These accounts of abolition do not sufficiently consider the creative impulse that is inherent to abolitionist thought. Black creative imagination, I argue, is fundamental to abolitionism as in itself a form of social critique that draws on speculative imagination to deconstruct reality. In this project, I turn to creative imagination expressed in the twentieth- and twenty-first century black-authored literary and artistic texts that envision the abolition of the social world by imagining alternative futures and speculating about new ways of being in the world. By engaging a range of aesthetic forms across several genres and mediums, I trace abolitionist thinking in black speculative fiction, contemporary multi-media art, and digital activist culture precisely in order to suggest the importance of taking seriously the imaginative potential of abolitionism.

The examples of imaginative cultural criticism, as it pertains to abolitionist thought, can be located in the science fiction of W. E. B. Du Bois and in the horror fiction of Jewelle Gomez, in the contemporary mixed-media art of Titus Kaphar and Harmonia Rosales, as well as in digital art produced by digital users on social media platforms. These creative works uncover the ways in which abolitionist imaginary makes an appearance in black cultural and intellectual production that is not immediately considered to be ‘political,’ let alone abolitionist. Nevertheless, as I suggest, it is precisely these obscure creative works of abolitionist imagination that can help understand the many contingencies of abolitionist thought in the present day and, more precisely, help answer the question of what it means to locate and engage in the practice of radical hope in the face of insurmountable violence in slavery’s afterlife.

“Between Boys: Fantasy of Male Homosexuality in Boys’ Love, Mary Renault, and Marguerite Yourcenar” examines an unexpected kinship between Boys’ Love, a Japanese male-on-male romance genre, and literary works by Mary Renault and Marguerite Yourcenar, two mid-twentieth century authors who wrote about male homosexuality. Following Eve Sedgwick, who proposed that a “rich tradition of cross-gender inventions of homosexuality” should be studied separately from gay and lesbian literature, this dissertation examines male homoerotic fictions authored by women. These fictions foreground a disjunction between authorial and textual identities in gender and sexuality, and they have often been accused of inauthenticity, appropriation, and exploitation. This dissertation cuts through these critical impulses by suspending their attachment to identitarian thinking and a hierarchical understanding of political radicality in order to account for the seduction of fantasy in these texts.

Exploring narrative strategies, critical receptions, textual and extra-textual relationalities produced by the three bodies of works, this dissertation delineates a paradigm for reading cross-gender homoerotic texts that is neither gay nor queer, neither paranoid nor reparative, and instead focuses on fantasy and how it produces pleasure. Fantasy is used in two senses here: as a preoccupation with relationships in romantic fantasies and as a desire to depart from the here and now. By thinking through both forms of fantasies, I examine the misalignments between identity and identifications in Boys’ Love, Renault’s historical novels about ancient Greece, and Yourcenar’s cross-identifications with gender, temporal, and cultural otherness. Close readings of not only the texts in question, but also discourses around them reveal erotic relationalities both within and outside of male homoerotic fantasies. The end of the dissertation reroutes my discussions back to Japan and debates about gay authenticity in order to foreground fantastical connections that would otherwise be overlooked in a reading that focuses more on identity than disidentifications, cross-identifications, and relationalities.

Big House: Women, Prison, and the Domestic, addresses the development of the contemporary US carceral state, foregrounding the confinement and control of women and the evolving ideological frameworks and disciplinary techniques that guided women’s incarceration beginning with the inception of state-run women’s prisons in the nineteenth century. These new prisons for women reproduced and refined modes of capture intrinsic to the modern domestic home and, in turn, served as a laboratory for the further development of domestic forms of discipline, making up what I term “the carceral domestic.” By focusing on the women’s prison, and on women’s confinement more generally as it relates to the home and housing, this project expands the critical archive that accompanies contemporary critiques of mass incarceration. The dissertation consists of three sections. The Birth of the Carceral Domestic, A Women’s Prison in Three Acts, and Home Economics, covering the early period of the sex-segregated women’s prison in the nineteenth century, the development of gendered forms of carceral control through practices of confinement and exclusion over the twentieth, and the contemporary women’s prison in the age of mass incarceration and neoliberal privatization. I draw on a broad range of materials and genres, including personal narratives, domestic homemaking manuals, TV shows, judicial opinions, prison policy codes, and acts of Congress. Through these varied accounts of the intersecting spheres of prison and home, Big House contests the fixity of the boundaries between them, and writes gender into conversations about mass incarceration.

The advent and generalization of digital computing machines in the twentieth century spelled a wholesale revolution in communication technologies. As with every technological revolution, this one came irreducibly co-involved with transformations in the economic sphere. In the latter half of the twentieth century, this meant financialization, which comprised an exponential expansion in the size and power of finance, a reversal in preeminence between the “real” and the financial economy, and the saturation of an increasing proportion of social processes with financial logics and evaluative criteria. None of these developments would have been possible without digital computers. This dissertation, Cash Flows: A Media Archeology of Financial Engineering, 1958-1987, details the involution between late-twentieth century finance and digital media, demonstrating that to understand finance, we must understand the digital, and to understand the digital, we must understand finance.Financialization and the computerization of finance can be accounted for, I show, under the rubric of financial engineering, a distinct mode of financial operation that emerged beginning in 1958. Financial engineering combines a novel conceptual scheme with novel technologies. The conceptual scheme, no-arbitrage, takes over for earlier neoclassical understandings of economic and financial operation based on equilibrium; it shifts the responsibility for the maintenance of “true” prices from the counterbalancing forces of spontaneous rational actors to the concerted efforts of financial theorists. Concomitantly, I show, it uses digital computers to transform financial theory from a post facto, empirical, and descriptive venture to an ex ante, speculative, and constructive one. Financial theory becomes a real-time data processing operation. Drawing on media theory and the philosophy of technology and updating the foundational account of human-machine interaction offered by the French philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon, Cash Flows offers a way to understand how media transformation drove financialization, what financialization tells us about media transformation, and what consequences we should expect from the continued generalization of digital technologies. The revolution of the digital, as I detail, involves a profound change in the relationship between machines and symbols. Rather than simply reproducing symbols—a capacity machines had possessed since at least the fifteenth century—digital machines operationalized them. As Cash Flows argues, the fundamental factor in last century’s financial transformation was the newfound ability of machines to transform symbols into actions. Digital computers enabled finance to machinically operationalize social and subjective processes humans carry out as a matter of course. Concomitantly, then, the saturation an increasing proportion of social processes by digital media is equally finance’s conquest of the social. All the consequences we see within the finance narrowly defined—from the construction of totalizing interconnection between elements that had previously been understood as belonging to separate spheres; to the transformation of psychic and social flows into value-generating data streams; to the enlistment of the human as a co-processor of digital data; to more frequent, more widely ranging, and more severe crises amplified by feedback loops between humans and machines—are equally the social consequences of digitization.

In 1925, Sigmund Freud wrote a short preface for August Aichhorn’s forthcoming book, Wayward Youth. There, Freud hailed ‘the child’ as the future of psychoanalysis, declaring that “[o]f all the fields in which psychoanalysis has been applied none has aroused so much interest… as the theory and practice of child training. …The child has become the main object of psychoanalysis research” (Freud, p. v). Freud’s observation was prophetic as the figure of the child did indeed become the central focus of psychoanalysis’s theories of psychic life in the decades that followed. Throughout the interwar and postwar periods in Western Europe, child analysis became the most innovative and influential strain of psychoanalysis as child analysts turned their gaze, clinically and socially, to the formative impact of the mother-child relation. As I show, psychoanalysts used the figure of the child to expand the political reach of their work by mobilizing the clinic as a site through which to theorize politics.

In my dissertation, I analyze the ascension of the child as a way into a broader consideration of the political life of psychoanalytic practice in the twentieth century. In the wake of World Wars, mass casualties, and the dramatic reorganization of Europe, child analysts like Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, D.W. Winnicott, and John Bowlby reinvented clinical practice for the child patient according to explicitly political idioms. The analytic exercise of paternal "authority," the cultivation of maternal “reparations,” and the maternal facilitation of an inherent “democratic tendency,” and the provision of maternal “security” were just some of the ways that these child analysts defined their clinical work. Tracing these techniques through the rise and fall of democracy in interwar, wartime, and postwar Europe, I argue that the clinic became a proto-political laboratory where psychoanalysts experimented with different formats of political action and relation. For these analysts, the clinic was anything but apolitical. But, in contrast to analyses that address the abstract connotation of these terms, in my analysis I focus specifically on their gendered dimensions, revealing how political concepts like authority, reparation, democracy, and security were reconfigured in the clinic according to the perimeters of maternity and paternity. As I contend throughout, the child analytic clinic provided a site for explicitly gendered forms of political theorizing.

In Chapter One, “On Good Authority: Anna Freud, Child Analysis, and the Politics of Authority,” I chart how Anna Freud postulated the clinical necessity of paternal authority, situating her work within interwar political debates about the relationship between democracy and authority. In Chapter Two, “Beyond Repair: War, Reparation, and Melanie Klein’s Clinical Play Technique,” I interrogate the ethical status of Klein’s clinical idealization of maternal reparations by contextualizing them within wartime Britain and the effects of German reparations. Chapter Three, “Mothering a Nation: D.W. Winnicott, Gender, and the Postcolonial British Welfare State,” reads Winnicott’s “Piggle” case study in order to elaborate how Winnicott’s theories of good enough mothering and an inherent democratic tendency were grappling with the effects of British decolonization. In chapter four, “States of Security: John Bowlby, Cold War Politics, and Infantile Attachment Theory,” I reveal how the language of maternal security that Bowlby promoted in his clinical work buttressed a growing Cold War emphasis on national security.

Child’s Play contributes to a growing body of scholarship by feminist theorists, historians, and political theorists like Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg (2011), Sally Alexander (2012), Michal Shapira (2013), Eli Zartesky (2015), Daniel Pick and Matt ffytche (2016), and Dagmar Herzog (2017) that showcases how psychoanalysis was influenced by—and, in turn, had a decisive influence on—the political climates it inhabited. My project adds to this work an explicit focus on the psychoanalytic clinic and the gendered scientific techniques developed therein. Although the psychoanalytic clinic has often dismissed for being either politically isolated or irredeemably normalizing, one of the overarching arguments that I make throughout this project is that a keen attention to clinical technique—to the unique scientific methods analysts developed to relate to and treat the psyche of the modern child—is an invaluable resource for understanding the political reach of psychoanalysis. Critically, these child psychoanalytic vocabularies and techniques developed together with the spread of liberal democracies following World War I and, to the extent that they narrate modern political affiliations through psychological narratives of childhood, they are still at the forefront of fervent political contestations today.

My dissertation project, Doktor Zhivago’s Cold War, follows the global travels of Boris Pasternak’s novel as it becomes a key text in the propaganda politics of the 1950s. The story I tell contributes to scholarly understandings of literature as covert warfare by analyzing a primary archive and offering new insight into the cultural dimensions of the Cold War. I reimagine what a literary history means in a global frame by considering how different actors—CIA agents, publishers, and readers in the Soviet Union, the United States, and Italy—approached Doktor Zhivago as both a fictional text and a political weapon. Taken together, the chapters of Doktor Zhivago’s Cold War offer a global story of Pasternak’s novel in order to draw a more comprehensive picture of literature’s importance as propaganda during the Cold War. The history I offer revises our understanding of the globality of Cold War cultural politics.

"Facts and Fictions: Feminist Literary Criticism and Cultural Critique, 1968-2012" is a critical history of the unfolding of feminist literary study in the US academy. It contributes to current scholarly efforts to revisit the 1970s by reconsidering often-repeated narratives about the critical naivety of feminist literary criticism in its initial articulation. As the story now goes, many of the most prominent feminist thinkers of the period engaged in unsophisticated literary analysis by conflating lived social reality with textual representation when they read works of literature as documentary evidence of real life. As a result, the work of these "bad critics," particularly Kate Millett and Andrea Dworkin, has not been fully accounted for in literary critical terms.

This dissertation returns to Dworkin and Millett's work to argue for a different history of feminist literary criticism. Rather than dismiss their work for its conflation of fact and fiction, I pay attention to the complexity at the heart of it, yielding a new perspective on the history and persistence of the struggle to use literary texts for feminist political ends. Dworkin and Millett established the centrality of reality and representation to the feminist canon debates of "the long 1970s," the sex wars of the 1980s, and the more recent feminist turn to memoir. I read these productive periods in feminist literary criticism from 1968 to 2012 through their varied commitment to literary works.

Chapter One begins with Millett, who de-aestheticized male-authored texts to treat patriarchal literature in relation to culture and ideology. Her mode of literary interpretation was so far afield from the established methods of New Criticism that she was not understood as a literary critic. She was repudiated in the feminist literary criticism that followed her and sought sympathetic methods for reading women's writing. In that decade, the subject of Chapter Two, feminist literary critics began to judge texts on the basis of their ability to accurately depict the reality of women's experiences.

Their vision of the relationship between life and fiction shaped arguments about pornography during the sex wars of the 1980s, the subject of Chapter Three. In this context, Dworkin was feminism's "bad critic." I focus on the literary critical elements of Dworkin's theories of pornographic representation and align her with Millett as a miscategorized literary critic. In the decades following the sex wars, many of the key feminist literary critics of the founding generation (including Dworkin, Jane Gallop, Carolyn Heilbrun, and Millett) wrote memoirs that recounted, largely in experiential terms, the history this dissertation examines. Chapter Four considers the story these memoirists told about the rise and fall of feminist literary criticism. I close with an epilogue on the place of literature in a feminist critical enterprise that has shifted toward privileging theory.

French Feminism has little to do with feminism in France. While in the U.S. this now canonical body of work designates almost exclusively the work of three theorists—Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva—in France, these same thinkers are actually associated with the rejection of feminism. If some scholars have on this basis passionately denounced French Feminism as an American invention, there exists to date no comprehensive analysis of that invention or of its effects. Why did theorists who were at best marginal to feminist thought and political practice in France galvanize feminist scholars working in the United States? Why does French Feminism provoke such an intense affective response in France to this date? Drawing on the fields of feminist and queer studies, literary studies, and history, “Inventing ‘French Feminism:’ A Critical History” offers a transnational account of the emergence and impact of one of U.S. academic feminism’s most influential bodies of work. The first half of the dissertation argues that, although French Feminism has now been dismissed for being biologically essentialist and falsely universal, feminists working in the U.S. academy of the 1980s, particularly feminist literary critics and postcolonial feminist critics, deployed the work of Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva to displace what they perceived as U.S. feminist literary criticism’s essentialist reliance on the biological sex of the author and to challenge U.S. academic feminism’s inattention to racial differences between women. French Feminism thus found traction among feminist scholars to the extent that it was perceived as addressing some of U.S. feminism’s most pressing political issues. The second half of the dissertation traces French feminist scholars’ vehement rejection of French Feminism to an affectively charged split in the French women’s liberation movement of the 1970s and shows that this split has resulted in an entrenched opposition between sexual difference and materialist feminism, an opposition that continues to structure French feminist debates to this day. “Inventing ‘French Feminism:’ A Critical History” ends by arguing that in so far as the U.S. invention of French Feminism has contributed to the emergence of U.S. queer theory, it has also impeded its uptake in France. Taken as a whole, this dissertation thus implicitly argues that the transnational circulation of ideas is simultaneously generative and disabling.

This thesis surveys the aesthetics mobilized by Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life and Where Reasons End as well as Weike Wang’s Joan is Okay to accommodate and navigate the negative, non-cathartic, and untelegenic feelings that arise in Asian American and diasporic realities. This thesis adopts the theoretical framework of minor literature, minor feelings, and minor aesthetics, which prefigures a formal-affective-aesthetic approach. Pertaining to the specificities of Asian American and Asian diasporic affectivity, this thesis focuses on unfeeling as an example of minor feeling and examines the aesthetics of flatness and inscrutability. Li’s two works and Wang’s work are chosen for they exhibit different ways of representing and negotiating affective flatness and inscrutability. With two main body chapters respectively devoted to Li’s writing and Wang’s writing, this thesis theorizes the critical productivity, aesthetic sensibility, and political potential of unfeeling and inscrutability. With regard to the general field of Asian American literary studies, this thesis contributes to the pertinent questions of how to read superficiality and inscrutability as well as how to theorize negativity and ambivalence.

How does gay pornography inscribe gay identity, and what might that inscription reveal? Pornographesis asks how gay pornography has come to organize the feelings, desires, pleasures, memories, attachments, and identifications of the male homosexual subject. LGBTQ scholarship tends to forego a rigorous study of gay erotic media altogether in favor of less sexualized, more recuperable objects. As a result, the representational histories and media cultures of gay pornography remain largely obscured from contemporary discourse. This dissertation examines regimes of gay pornography that make visible its shifting contours. Unlike other studies that take pornography as their subject, mine does not aim to reduce pornography’s meaning to monolithic postures of either pleasure or harm, but rather locates the possibility for vexed in-betweens, discontinuities, and ruptures. The central question of Pornographesis is not just how gay pornography inscribes gay identity, but how that inscription changes over time and according to circumstance. Across four sequential eras, I examine notable shifts in the narrative structures, cultural position, and reception practices of gay pornography. I link these shifts to changes in media, from 8 and 16mm film to video, print, telephonic, theatrical, and digital technologies.

Situated as an Americanist project, Pornographesis engages the historical materialism, media shifts, and narrative dynamisms that attend its development from the 1960s to today. Following Laura Kipnis’s notion that pornography is one of culture’s honored sites for working through social problems, I approach gay pornography as an engagement with the “problem” that homosexuality has been thought to constitute. In each era, gay pornography inscribes identity around a different set of relations to produce figures that range from necessarily clandestine, to defiantly perverse; from obsessively technophilic, to exploitatively entrepreneurial. Moreover, each era reveals the many and changing demands that the producers and viewers alike place on pornography: that it be beautiful, liberated, narrative, risky, safe, carnal, political, elegiac, honest, authentic, masculine, interactive, and so forth. As such, this dissertation argues that there is not just one uniform gay pornographic culture, but many. The mercurial quality of gay pornography delivers not just pleasure, but critical intervention in political crises, alternate imaginings of social structures, and valuable contestation of the rigid demands of heteronormative masculinity. Pornographesis makes the case that the study of gay male pornography is not merely instructive, but is in fact crucial for comprehending modern gay identity.

As/if: US Literary Criticism and Identity turns to early queer and third-wave feminist scholarship to identify a unique strategy and style of literary criticism, which I name as/if criticism. As/if criticism is both born of and resistant to two conflicting imperatives in the US academy, which first come to a fore during the 1990s. The first is the demand to write “as”: that is, the institutional demand that critics use their gender, race, sexuality, etc. as credentials of authentic knowledge. The second is the demand to write “as if”: that is, the post-structuralist demand that critique suspend the idea of knowable or stable identity. Challenging both of these demands, as/if criticism employs four different strategies—recognition, qualification, intimacy, and interruption—in order to disrupt identity as it is produced and valued as a knowable category within literary criticism. Taking five authors as case studies, I examine Eve Sedgwick’s compendium of queer critical essays, Tendencies (1993); Deborah McDowell’s debut work of black feminist criticism, The Changing Same (1995); Barbara Johnson’s deconstructive take on race and gender, The Feminist Difference (1995); and Robert Reid-Pharr’s innovative critical essay collection, Black Gay Man (2001). Over the course of its chapters, As/if: US Literary Criticism and Identity makes the case that as/if criticism is well-suited to describe fraught social bonds, experimental allegiances, and unintuitive cross-identifications because its style mirrors the substance of its argument.

It is difficult to remember and perhaps harder to imagine that, once upon a time, a person with no prior experience could build a webpage in a couple of afternoons. Today, due to increasing interactivity and dynamism, building out things on the web is the domain of professionals and committed enthusiasts. As people who make use of the internet, we are distanced from a technology that supposedly democratized truth while we are simultaneously permeated by its fantastic lies. If parsing and arbitrating truth must take place prior to interface, but interface remains intrinsic to everyday life, then a need develops for interpretation before the interaction. It isn’t enough to know what is said, the meaning must be known as well. As more people are more reliant on platforms controlled by distant experts, these same experts become an organic choice for the authority to judge meaning. As with the development of the web, this complex task of arbitration is deferred to machines, even if there are only ever people on the other side of judgment. With this in mind, it is easier to see how power only slightly altered from prior forms emerges in an entirely new and permanently dynamic environment like the internet. This project is an exploration of the rationality behind such power, an apparatus which I am calling datafication. I argue that we can begin to understand datafication by way of comparison between the initial investment in data as utopian extensions of the self during the 80s and 90s and data’s value for data-industries over the first two decades of the 2000s. This trajectory marks the most crucial shift from our early hopes about data to our late frustrations. Initially operationalized through internet users and further leveraged through digital platforms, datafication is, in simple terms, a sum of monetization schemes by tech companies meant to derive profit from data they have accrued as a persistent yet incidental byproduct of their business. I will illustrate this regime of power through subsequent case studies of a period of emergence, of experimentation, and ultimately, mastery. Through case studies of the dot-com bubble, the Boston Marathon Bombing, and the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Scandal, I look at datafication as the model for power relations from the late 20th century through today and as the business of the internet. These exemplar cases show the ways in which datafication is articulated with everyday life. This project describes the regime of power that functions through datafication in order to locate how it started, why it happened, and the ways in which it continues to function. Crystallizations of key moments make visible important kinds of changes that increase the efficacy of datafication over time. First in the economy, next in policing and the surveillance state, and finally in politics and social operations. Fully rendered, these three facets of datafication will reveal its presence at the very beginning of digitalization, then its emergence from, and eventual operation in excess of, this continuous technological substrate. To clarify the historical change, we need to see digitalization and datafication as bound through time, as a continuous colonization of the space of everyday life. My project argues that the former is the technical infrastructure, while the latter allows the social, political, and technical operationality of a regime of power. The one is always happening with and through the other, but over time one becomes more important, superseding its infrastructure in consequential ways. Regimes of power, in the historical contextualization that I will provide, are exercised and expressed in economic terms, in state surveillance terms, and in political-ideological terms which are often not explicit. The project will thus provide a genealogical account by describing how both digitalization and datafication relate to one another using the three case studies.

This dissertation turns to illiberal state violence and state formation in Latin America’s Southern Cone region as the ground for trans politics and activisms. Focusing on the entanglements of Argentine trans politics with histories of dictatorship (1976-83), I ask: how do contemporary transgender cultural producers deploy and revise historical narratives of national trauma to stake gender rights claims in the present? What sorts of political, aesthetic, and legal tactics do trans cultural producers adopt within political contexts hyper-saturated by state violence? What ethical and political challenges arise? In response, I formulate a trans framework of analysis that combines archival, visual culture, literary, and ethnographic methods to study contemporary transgender politics and cultural production as these have taken shape in response to shifting Argentine state formations.

Each chapter considers how trans activists strategically deploy existing visual and material culture, activist strategies, and legal interventions developed by antigenocide activists such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to forward trans rights claims. In doing so, my work traces unexpected affinities between Argentine transgender and antigenocide politics, cultural production, and activisms. Taken together, the dissertation’s chapters evoke an interdisciplinary method that twins the study of cultural practices with histories of state violence, focusing on gender and sexuality as central to such analyses. By tracing the ways Argentine trans activists reanimate the past to meet the demands of the present, my dissertation offers an historical interpretation of trans political subjectivity that extends and revises trans studies’ geopolitical imagination, bringing Latinx American archives, national histories, and political strategies to bear on existing trans studies scholarship.

This dissertation, The Lure of Origins: Sexology and the Trans Autobiographical Mandate, intervenes in the conundrum I call “the trans autobiographical mandate” that characterizes the relationship between U.S. Trans studies and sexological genres of trans autobiography. The conundrum is as follows: some forms of trans self-representation—namely, those found in sexological archives—have been understood by Trans Studies to be oppressive and too mired in anti-trans ideologies and discourses to allow for trans people’s agency. This has meant that, to do justice to the trans authors of these autobiographies, Trans Studies critics have been compelled to read the past through the enabling perspective of a trans affirming present, where what is found in the archive is given new shape through contemporary lexicons of trans identity. At the same time, other forms of trans self-representation, including those found on the presumed “outside” of medicine, have been endowed with a liberatory potential to challenge, disrupt, overcome, and rewrite the norms and ideologies of medicalization that have historically defined trans life in limited and limiting ways. In The Lure of Origins, I argue against three tendencies that have characterized the dominant position of Trans Studies in its attempt to resolve the conundrum of the trans autobiographical mandate: I contest the idea that trans medicalization only represses trans life, which has established the assumption that the field already knows both what can be found in the medical archive and how to read what we find there; I resist the idea that there exist forms of trans autobiography that are free from the constraints of medicalization and pathologization; and I refuse the burden that this bifurcation in modes of autobiographical reading and writing places on trans people to know ourselves and each other, to be able to author and authorize our own stories, and to do so in terms which are imagined to be our own. To these ends, I reopen an anonymous case study I call “the case of the metamorphosing physician,” which arrives to us in the Trans Studies present as definitively trans, in order to retell the story of how the case arrives here. I construct an account of the multiplicity that this case carries in its enmeshment in discourse, interpretation, and the desires of those who have gone back to read and re-read it while offering pathologizing frames for understanding its true meaning. Over four chapters, I follow the case study’s successive resignification in the course of the long twentieth century sexological canon: as a “Stage of Transition to Metamorphosis Sexualis Paranoica” in Krafft-Ebing (1892); a case of delusional cross-dressing for Magnus Hirschfeld (1910); an illustration of the difference between same-sex desire and cross-gender identity in Havelock Ellis (1913); and finally as the original autobiography of a transsexual in Richard Green (1966). In each chapter, I examine how the meaning of this paradigmatic case study evolves by changing sets of sexological hermeneutics which transform how the autobiography is read. I call attention to the multiple diagnostic inheritances buried within the contemporary signifier “trans,” including those that carry a pathologizing history with which the field has sought to dispense, and argue against reading this case within the singular “true” meaning of a trans origin offered by Trans Studies today. By attending to each scene of its medicalization, I consider how “trans” harbors a complex history of pathologizing frameworks from which it is still not free. I also show how the notion of a self-defining trans person who knows themselves does not emerge apart from the history of trans medicalization, but rather as a product of medicalization itself, which has demanded an equation between health and self-certainty as a prerequisite for trans inclusion. I insist on the importance of attending to the complex archive of pathology that troubles Trans Studies from the inside, not to recuperate pathology for more liberatory ends, but to disrupt the fantasy of the trans autobiographical mandate which demands a self-authorizing and self-knowing trans subject. I argue for a de-exceptionalizing story of the trans “origin” which refuses to pull this figure from the past into the self-conscious form that Trans Studies now desires. Ultimately, I rethink the terms by which trans affirmation has been made equivalent to the insistence that trans must be disarticulated from categories associated with insanity, particularly paranoia and psychosis, in order to be legitimate. By refusing this disarticulation or the assumptions in which it is grounded—which would only permit the freedom of transition to subjects who are presumed, by medicine’s own standards, to be sane—I insist on reading “trans” within a broader context in which its formation is unthinkable outside of its enmeshment with pathologizing histories. In doing so, I offer a mode of storytelling that historizes “trans” while resisting the demand to prove trans sanity through the articulation of true trans selves in transparent, autobiographical speech.

This dissertation, “The Privatization of Protection: The Neoliberal Fourteenth Amendment” examines how the importation of private law and free market frameworks into public law have reshaped the Supreme Court’s understanding of equality and due process in areas as diverse as international arbitration, access to abortion, and affirmative action. My research draws on both legal and critical theory methods, reading studies of political economy alongside analysis of doctrinal and historical sources, to explore how the rhetoric of the market transforms and limits the ways we imagine our society and the role of government in it. This dissertation traces how the embrace of the models of efficiency, choice, and human capital by both liberal and conservative justices alike has eroded the law’s protective role. Equal protection and due process have been redefined according to the needs, logics, and limits of the market with consequences disproportionately borne by the poor and working class.

In the industrial vocabulary of the nineteenth century, “obsolescence” is regularly cast as a loss; it is the profit forfeited when advances in technology render the current means of production unnecessary. But in the twentieth century obsolescence morphs in both sensibility and cultural meaning, becoming a routine feature of discourses dedicated to the re-invention of the self, as in the declaration of an ad from the New York Times of November 12,1950: “New New a thousand times New (we’d rather die than obsolesce!)” Here and elsewhere obsolescence becomes valued for the distinction it helps to impart: that modernity is about newness, that futurity and commodities are often linked to the ephemeral. For the Futurists, “houses will last less long than we”; for General Motor’s Alfred P. Sloan, automobiles will change every year; for the post-WWII manufacturers of disposable goods, objects like Kleenex will lapse mere seconds after their use. My dissertation “Useless: The Aesthetics of Obsolescence in Twentieth Century U.S. Culture” studies how art acts as a repository for the obsolete, a “home” for the worthless objects, rejected places, and ruined bodies otherwise considered to be useless.

The project is divided into four chapters that trace how the presence of obsolescence in cultural texts produces aesthetic effects that resist, mourn, or disrupt the logic of obsolescence. In my first chapter, “The Totemic: Willa Cather, Mesa Verde, and Modernist Form,” I illustrate how modern artists form a relation to obsolete objects that is sacred. Reading Willa Cather’s novel The Professor’s House (1925) in relation to her own cross-country journey to Mesa Verde National Park in 1915, I argue that the park, the museum, and the World Exposition all demonstrate the ways in which the U.S. forges a “totemic” relation between its citizens and obsolete indigenous objects in the first decades of the twentieth century. This relation is what motivates the National Park Service to preserve the indigenous ruin and to accrue vast tracks of land and expend Federal resources to assure their continuity; it is also what attracts Cather to these particular objects as worthy of literary representation, producing a “totemic” form that mirrors the form of the National Park. Importantly, the various acts the U.S. is committing contemporaneously in order to preserve the ruins (expelling tribes from ancestral homelands, laying claim to sacred spaces, appropriating funeral objects) is actively under erasure in both the NPS and Cather’s text.

In Chapter Two “Decaying Spaces: Faulkner’s Gothic and the Construction of the Capitalist Real,” I continue the trajectory begun in the first chapter with a focus on how obsolescence impacts modernist aesthetic practice. In particular, I study William Faulkner’s novels As I Lay Dying (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), and Absalom, Absalom (1932) to illustrate how his literary modernism is not a movement dedicated to the “new” but is instead deeply invested in the objects (and bodies) made “useless” by industrialization. Interestingly, it is his investment in rusting artifacts that prompts literary critics to assign his works to the gothic tradition. Responding to this classification, I argue that since the categorization of literature often defaults to realism-mimesis as the originary mode from which all other genres deviate, many critical accounts of Faulkner tend to simply approximate how far his narration strays from accurately describing economic reality. The paradox is that Faulkner’s narration of the actual decay present in his cultural landscape is often not “real” enough to be considered realism; it is in “excess” of the real, which suggests that the capitalist real is an ideal referent containing only minimal traces of degradation. I therefore explore the tension in the first half of the 20th century between realism and Gothicism where, increasingly, the capitalist real comes to be articulated around that which is new, modern, and efficient.

Taking as its historical marker the automation of industry, Chapter Three “The Political: Junk, Trash, and Post-Modern Technique” investigates how a junk aesthetic begins to develop in the mid-century out of the detritus of industrial production. To illustrate how this aesthetic functions in literary texts, I examine Philip K Dick’s novels Time Out of Joint (1954), Ubik (1969), and Valis (1981) as well as his depiction in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) of “kipple”—all of the useless objects like wrappers, containers, and plastics that industrialism leaves behind and that ultimately threatens the grounding of our material existence. Since Gross Domestic Product peaks in the middle of the century, making these the years in which the United States floods the cultural landscape with a staggering amount of disposable goods, I argue that writers and artists in the 1950s and 60s (Bruce Conner, George Herms, Ed Kienholz) respond to this saturation by making sculptures and fictional worlds out of plastic chairs, dirty dishes, and wrecked autos, an illustration of how the obsolete commodity, meant to be ephemeral, takes on a new political significance in the art of the mid-century.

The last chapter “Apocalyptic Vision: Revelation in the Ruins of Detroit” examines how the city that perfects built-in obsolescence finds itself obsolete. In particular, I study how the recent proliferation of ruin photography circulating both online and in print registers the obsolescence of the U.S. industrial sector. Based on the sheer number of visual texts that take Detroit’s ruins as its subject: Lowell Boileau’s The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit (1996), Andrew Moore’s Detroit Disassembled (2010), Dan Austin and Sean Doerr’s Lost Detroit (2010), Julien Temple’s Requiem for Detroit (2010), Marchand and Meffre’s The Ruins of Detroit (2011), not to mention all of the amateur footage on YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook, I consider Detroit ruin photography to be a genre in its own right. I illustrate how the focus of these representations is on industrial decay—the ruinous landscape of post-industrial Detroit with its abandoned houses, defunct factories, and rusting ports, and argue that the effect of this decay is “apocalyptic”; it is, to paraphrase Michel de Certeau, the very concept of the City that is in decline. To illustrate the economic force of obsolescence, I interrogate how post-industrial artists like Detroit’s Tyree Guyton re-purpose defunct industrial objects into art pieces at the same time that portions of decaying Detroit houses sell on the global art market as found art.