Intimate Publics: Reading 1

"Roxanne" spurs "Roxanne's Revenge" which spurs a diss on that and so on and so on. So, art?

Thinking about the IABA's next conference:

Late modernity has spot-lit intimate relations. Families, feelings and love lives have been opened to public politics...This conference begins from Lauren Berlant's term 'intimate public' to explore these new constituencies in relation to life writing and life storying across media, discipline and profession.

Apparently Berlant first unveiled her concept here:

Berlant, Lauren. "The Female Complaint." Social Text, No. 19/20 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 237-259. [JSTOR Stable URL] What I like immediately here is that it reads for "bourgeois" history, in this case of the female subject. We examine the values of Irma Bombeck, of Harriet Beecher Stowe, both of whom in their own way use the "complaint" form to great effect, which is a subject-positioning that the more monolithizing French feminism does not predict. There are several ways this can apply to a Yang Jiang reading, which I must annotate along with my reading of Litzinger from yesterday. Alas, that may have to wait yet another day.

"Complaining" here emerges as both an issue and something like a genre -- one that curiously includes both "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Roxanne's Revenge." The "complaint" always stops short of something -- the speaking subject is not truly radical, I suppose we could say. However, the "sites of resistance" incorporated in complaint and other "genres of self-containment" are able to actually expand women's rights even more powerfully than seemingly radical theories. Irma Bombeck beats lesbian separatists. Yang Jiang beats Madame Mao?

Bourgeois women deply "sentimentality, melodrama, and domestic irony" strategically. The "intimate public" as I seem to understand it, describes the relationship between the bourgeois feminine voice and her readers: it has the authority of the mother, and hence an "intimate" relationship to the reading public. Harriet Beecher Stowe created a situation in which readers understood slavery to be wrong because it horrible to the good mothers and wives of good houses. This strategy can get a lot done, as I plan to show in the last chapter of my dissertation.