Why and how do people stay attached to fantasies of a life that are also wearing them out? How is it possible to unlearn visceral responses that reproduce supremacist and privileged imaginaries of sovereign comfort and freedom? How to use the pleasures of attachment to make sustainable alter-worlds in the present that involve creative solidarity and critical judgment? What’s the relation between critique and transformative social vision? In these scenes of relation, state, juridical, and institutional practices tangle with more informal social conventions and movements. Psychoanalytic, aesthetic, political, and ethnographic ways of processing structures and encounters also converge in writing about and toward heterotopian infrastructures. Politically related rhetorics of love and sentimentality too provide analytic material for engaging scenes of hierarchy and world-transformative attachment.
Social and aesthetic refusals to reproduce the predictable violence of racist, misogynist, class and heteronormative forms of life are also central to my work’s engagement with the bleed among power, bodies, and aesthetics. My first three books- The Anatomy of National Fantasy, The Female Complaint, and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City-work with the concept of “national sentimentality” to get at the visceral and juridical forms of attachment involved with the nation, capitalism, citizenship, and sociality in everyday life.Ĭruel Optimism, in contrast, hooks into the emerging ordinary of a world no longer capable of sustaining the fantasies of power, safety and flourishing that fuel national sentimentality. from the nineteenth to the the twenty-first century: in particular, in relation to juridical citizenship, with its history of racial, gendered and class antagonism radical, normative, and ambivalent modes of social belonging and practices of intimacy as they absorb and throw their creative weight against legal, normative, and fantasmatic forces. My work has focused on the affective components of social proximity in the U.S.
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